« Schlecks climb onto podium with Stage 17 win | Main | Stage 19: Cavendish takes five on day for breakaway »

July 23, 2009

Team Radio Shack apparently new Armstrong, Bruyneel team

Ever since the Giro d'Italia in May, there have been rumors about a new U.S. based team, apparently to feature and be owned by Lance Armstrong and to be run by Johann Bruyneel.

In June, Joe Lindsey ran a story on Bicycling.com detailing contingency plans he said were in place for an Astana financial meltdown, which was narrowly avoided when Kazakh and US sponsors came up with $6 million to guarantee support through the end of this season. Lindsey said the team would have been called the “Livestrong-Nike” team.

Just before the Tour, Alexandre Vinokourov had a press conference, where he reminded everyone that Astana was a team built around him, and that he intended to return to the team when his suspension ended July 24th (tomorrow).

Tuesday, Bruyneel announced he would not return to Astana after this season, and Armstrong tweeted about an upcoming announcement of a new sponsor “for 2010 and beyond.”

Speculation immediately returned to “Livestrong-Nike,” but reporters who had talked to Armstrong's management team said that wouldn't be it, apparently with the knowledge that the new sponsor is to be a Ft. Worth, TX-based company.

This morning, Bonnie D. Ford of ESPN tweeted that someone in Capital Sports and Entertainment registered “teamradioshack.com" this week. CSE is Armstrong's management team, overseen by Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs, and ran the Discovery Channel team. I've verified the domain registration to CSE Cycling, LLC, and that it was set up on Monday. Currently, www.teamradioshack.com brings up only a default Apache web server page.

The official announcement is reportedly set for noon Eastern.

Update

The team website, Twitter ID (@teamradioshack), and Facebook page are up.

Livestrong.com has a video by Armstrong announcing the team, while Radio Shack offers a standard press release.



Note that no other riders have been officially announced for the team, nor has Bruyneel been officially named the DS.

Posted by Frank Steele on July 23, 2009 in Lance Armstrong, Top Stories | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:

https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341bf6df53ef011572277b57970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Team Radio Shack apparently new Armstrong, Bruyneel team:

Comments