As you probably know (since I explained the whole story here, here and here), the organisors of the grand tours (Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España) have been in a conflict with UCI since several years already (since the end of 2004) about the UCI ProTour.
However, the conflict seems to come to an end soon since the UCI today presented its plan for the future of professional cycling with which the Tour de France organisor would have agreed ...
As a reminder, the main reason for the conflict were the selection rules for the participation of teams (UCI: all ProTour are automatically allowed to participate, ASO: wanted to continue to manage the team selection itself) and finally also the -sometimes hidden- goal of the UCI to obtain the TV broadcasting rights ...
Friends for once, friends forever ... that's what one could think after reading that Michael Boogerd announces on August 13th that he will stop working for Rabobank and that Thomas Dekker announces today (August 14th) that his contract with the Rabobank cycling team has been terminated with immediate effect.
The two riders, Michael Boogerd as former captain of the Dutch cycling team and Thomas Dekker as promising future leader, have always been good friends and in 2007 they were never far from each other at the hotel, before the start and after the race and on the road during the race ... They also always shared the same hotel room and were OK to pose together for my picture of Thomas Dekker and Michael Boogerd before the Tour de France 2007 prologue in London.
On a 245 kilometers track - 60 flat kilometers followed by 12 climbs and descents and with the last kilometer in a climb as well (8 to 10%) - Beijing today organised the road cycling race of the Olympic Games 2008. The riders passed the Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China.
Part of the track was formed by a 24 km circuit which the riders did 7 times.
143 riders from no less than 55 countries started this morning at 11AM local time and the Spanish and Italian teams were the big favourites.
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