World’s best team HTC Highroad to say good bye to professional cycling
HTC Highroad is the most successful team in professional cycling as it has managed to bag numerous wins over the past few years. A total number of 39 cyclists with 18 different nationalities join in to form the World’s Number 1 team as ranked by Eurosport.
Team was initially known as Team Telekom with a sponsor of Deutsche Telekom when founded in 1991 and was renamed as T-Mobile Team after 13 years when it had a total number of 29 cyclists, 9 mechanics, 9 nurses and 22 partners.
Despite their admirable performances in the recent years, the team was not welcomed in the Tour de France 1995 but finally six members from the team were to be joined with three members of ZG Mobil team to form a composite team for the Tour. The six riders
from Telecom were Rolf Aldag, Vladimir Pulnikov, Jens Heppner, Udo Bolts, Olaf Ludwig and Erik Zabel.
Just after their first appearance in the Tour de France, 1995 and 1996 were the two years when that really proved out to be exceptional for the team as Bjarne Riis who finished third in the 1995 Tour de France and German cyclist Jan Ullrich completing the
Tour in the second spot. Erik Zabel continued his performance in the1996 Tour de France as he managed to win the points classification.
Ullrich came up as an even better player in 1997 as he won the mega Tour and was the first runner up in the Tour de France, 1998; team Telekom also received the honours of being the best team in the Tour de France, 1997.
Despite the fact that team T-Mobile was two cyclists short and was competing without the race favourite Jan Ullrich because of doping scandals as the team still managed to dominate the team’s classification consecutively for the third time in 2006.
Team has to find a new sponsor as in November 2007 as Deutsche Telekom publicised that it was finishing its associations with professional cycling. Team changed its name and continued its operations under the name “Team High Road” as Bob Stapleton exclusively
funded the Team because there was not enough time to attract the sponsors. It was not a German team anymore as their nationality was changed to American in February 2008.
Team’s performance since 2008 has been nothing short of spectacular as it has managed to win 484 wins and proved itself as the top team in the world.
Unfortunately though, team has announced to finish its connection with the professional sport by the end of 2011 as Bob mentioned, “I absolutely don’t want to be in the position of blaming anyone or to suggest anything other than we didn’t get it done, but
there are some destabilising factors in the sport.”
Rolf Aldag who is considered as the most respected directeur sportif and is the senior director of the team is using his connections to help find the cyclists future contracts as he stated, “My wife thinks that I’m totally crazy because she thinks I should
be out looking for offers for myself but I think that if the ship goes down then the captain probably shouldn’t jump first.”
Team has been unsuccessful in attracting the sponsors and Bob Stapleton had to face the disappointment from their current sponsor HTC who has failed to fulfill their word and as per Bob he could not understand the reason as to how it all fall apart but that
is reality and has to be accepted.
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