Cycling Racing News and Opinion
July 15, 2014

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Tour de France Rest Day News

The peloton gets a day off after yesterday's challenging stage 10.

Fabian Cancellara has had enough of this Tour de France. He will not start stage 11. "I want to go home and take a little break. The season has been very long for me. I started racing in Dubai. I have done 59 days of competition so far and I have another big goal at the end of the season: The World Championships." It's no secret that I want to be in the best shape there. Therefore it's important that I take a little rest...I liked the first part of the Tour a lot. There were many occasions that with a little more luck I could have had a great results. Unfortunately we lot Andy [Schleck] and Danny [van Poppel], but the team is strong and we will continue to look for opportunities."

Cancellara was sitting in 34th place, 29min 7sec behind Vincenzo Nibali.

After Alberto Contador broke his tibia when he crashed descending the Petit Ballon yesterday in stage 10, he was forced to withdraw from the Tour. Here is part of the release from his press office: "After Alberto Contador's crash in yesterday’s stage, the press conference scheduled at 15:00 was suspended. The Tinkoff-Saxoff team will start its training at 11:00 am.  Alberto Contador will undertake journey to Madrid around 12:00 pm in the plane that Oleg Tinkov has made available for starting treatment of his injured right knee as quickly as possible."

Later in the day I got this press release from Contador, who now has, perhaps unrealistic, ambitions to race the Vuelta:

Alberto Contador yesterday passed a medical examination in the CEMTRO
Hospital in Madrid, after which Dr. Manuel Leyes Vence confirmed a fissure
of the tibial plateau in his right leg that should not be operated.

“The doctor told me that surgery would increase the trauma the knee has
suffered and will delay recovery even more. The good news is
that I have no tendon or ligament injured and the fissure is in the best
possible place. At the least, I'll have to stop for two weeks and, until the wounds
heal, the leg has to be immobilized”, said Alberto Contador after leaving
the hospital in Madrid.

“Doctors have told me it will be almost impossible to be in the Tour of
Spain, but we'll see how the leg evolves. I am calm because they have
looked me up and down and I'm sure what I have. Doctors have put things
in very black way, but I will work hard in the coming weeks and we'll see how far
I can get”, said the leader of Tinkoff-Saxo.

Pro Continental team NetApp-Endura has a new sponsor starting with the 2015 season. It was announced that the team of Leopold Konig and Jan Barta will be sponsored by the German firm BORA.

The team web site said, "BORA, the manufacturer of cooktops and cooktop extractor systems, will be the new title sponsor of the current Team NetApp – Endura from the 2015 season on. The team, led by manager Ralph Denk, is currently the only German professional cycling team. BORA has committed itself for five years. For the first time since 2010, there will again be a German professional team with a main German sponsor.

"I am delighted to announce that with BORA we again have a German company back in professional cycling as a title sponsor. In BORA we have acquired a title sponsor that is entrepreneur-led, growing healthy, commercially well established and not afraid to compete with its innovations against the big companies. I can see clear parallels with our team. The commitment of BORA demonstrates that we have been on the right path for the last five years”, says Ralph Denk.

Pat McQuaid, former UCI boss, said that Lance Armstrong "is the victim of a USADA witch hunt." Jeez!

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