Grand Tours Out of ProTour Schedule

After over a year of squabbling over endless issues, the three grand tours of cycling, the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta a Espana, have announced they will no longer participate in the ProTour.

Patrice Clerc, president of Tour de France organizers ASO said, "the three Tours would still be on the world calendar next year, although not with the Pro-Tour label, but he added a separate calendar with the three Tours and maybe one new event could see the light in 2007.

The prospect of another major tour or the increase in status of a lesser tour is exciting, at least from my perspective. Heck, they could make a grand tour circuit with four races and crown an overall grand tour champion.

It was mentioned that the ProTour will lose much of its significance without the three major Tours, in one article I read. I don't believe that to be true. I think that even without the grand tours, the ProTour can succeed. It's not as if there weren't already other ProTour races run during the grand tours, but I can see how participation in the grand tours might take away the possibility to gain needed points in the ProTour rankings. That would have to be a choice of the team and rider as to which would be more important to their goals and the goals of their sponsors. And a tough one it would be... skip the one of more of the biggest races with potentially the teams biggest star rider so that he can gain points in the ProTour standings.

I suppose that isn't too much different from the schedule from the past where riders in the World Cup might skip important races to be rested for World Cup events. Though, most World Cup events landed around the grand tours on the race calendar, so maybe it's not a direct correlation.

Either way, I feel that cycling will endure these growing pains and come out stronger than before. But, that could be because cycling in America seems to be on a major upswing where as in Europe, fans are disillusioned by all the drug scandals.