The Tour de Georgia announced the teams that have accepted invitation to the race April 16-22. The field includes ProTour teams CSC, Discovery Channel, Saunier Duval-Prodir, Quick Step-Innergetic and Predictor-Lotto.
After breaking his arm in the Tour of California, George Hincapie is expected to make his return in Georgia. As in California the Discovery team is expected to be lead by Levi Leipheimer.
Tyler Hamilton is expected to lead his new team Tinkoff Credit System as he returns to racing in the U.S. after his suspension. It will be interesting to see the reception he gets from fans. I seems like cycling fans are pretty easy to forgive their heroes, and Hamilton maintains he never did anything wrong.
Hamilton’s name did come up in the Operation Puerto scandal, and today WADA announced it will seek civil action in the Puerto case. In my opinion, if the evidence in the Puerto case is substantiated, it would only be related to his doping offense that he has already served a suspension for, so I don’t see how he could be suspended again.
With the Tour of California now complete, word comes that the next big professional stage race in the United States is in financial trouble. The Tour de Georgia is scheduled to start run April 16-22, but organizers are still looking for a title sponsor after regional Ford dealers pulled out after last year’s race.
“We do have a rather sizable financial gap at the moment with regard to this year’s tour but we do remain optimistic about some discussions,” Chris Aronhalt, executive director of the tour said on Thursday. “We still remain optimistic we’ll have a great race in April.”
You have to wonder if an international race of this size can sustain the financial support it needs to keep going … especially in an area that is not exactly a cycling hotbed. The recent Tour of California was seen as a big success with an estimated 1.6 million spectators (probabaly a big overestmation), but that is in an area where cycling is very popular, there are more businesses based in California that may be open to sponsoring the race.
How many big international races can co-exist in America? Teams from Europe are not going to do every big race in the U.S. Now we have the Tour of California, Tour de Georgia, Tour of Missouri, Tour of Utah, and the Montreal-Boston races that all want to be big UCI events.
I can see the Tour of California being around for a long time, but I think races in other areas will come and go.
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