2006 Tour de France Announced

And that wasn't even the bigest news of the day. It seems that during the presentation, a video presentation of last years Tour was shown. It upset a number of people, namely the folks at Discovery, due to the snubbing of Lance Armstrong. The 10 minute long video recap of last years race main featured French coaches, riders, and fans. Three shots of Armstrong were also included.

I began to wonder why this might have happened, taking only two seconds to realize why. The French can't win their own race and haven't in 20 years. Sour Grapes! Anyway, I'll leave you with some links of good articles to read on the subject along with a quote from Johan Brunyeel.

Links first:
http://pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=3562 : From PEZcyclingnews.com
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2005/oct05/oct28news : From CyclingNews.com
http://www.letour.fr/2006/TDF/presentation/us/index.html : From Tour de France website


Now onto Johan!

Bruyneel continued. "When I think back on all that, it's been the same scenario for them for years. A French rider hasn't won the Tour in 20 years. Why? Simple, they haven't been good enough. And then you see the final ProTour standings and notice there were four Americans in the top 10 (Armstrong, 5th; Levi Leipheimer, 7th; Bobby Julich, 9th; George Hincapie, 10th) and for the French, they had four riders in the top 100 (David Moncoutie, 30th; Anthony Geslin, 62nd; Christophe Moreau, 79th; Laurent Brochard, 84th). That's the facts. It's nothing more than that. I realize it's frustrating for them."