I wouldent give much stock to this drama. Its like the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Both are boosting thier profile, look at us, mere peasants flocking to converse over their supposed dueling. Two men who dont like each other, certainly nothing new in the history books. Yes they are great men, but men non-the less.
I will offer a little more meat other than a text book brush-off.
I blame Lance for the rift, and here are but a few thoughts I have gathered.
Since when does a Team director and rider spend time preparing press reports and speeches during a grand Tour (Radioshack announcement). That is absolutely disgusting. They had a GC contender leading the Tour, ALL focus should be on him and the team clinching the victory. Instead, Lance and Bruyneel are parading and advertising their new plans.
Secondly, Lance enver worked for Contador this Tour. Never did Lance pace AC up the climbs. Instead, Lance covered himself, and himself only on the climbs. If anything, he used Kloden for his own benefit. Lance was never going to win, from day 1, and instead of parading and making AC look bad as he was so focused on doing, he should have focused on supporting AC.
It is even worse that he used the Tour as a platform for his advertising of LIVESTRONG and his new team Radioshack. LIVESTRONG.org is a non profit organization. LIVESTRONG.com is a for profit organization. He drove traffic to the for profit site by posting tweets, daily videos and so on on livestrong.com during the Tour. All his gear were labeled LIVESTRONG without distinguishing that there are two different organizations with the same name, one for profit and one not.So much for a guy who is suppose to have no "I" in Team.
All AC did was race a good race. The poor guy is just a victim or gullible press that feeds off anything thrown at them.
Had Lance attacked and Kloden dropped, it would have been labeled "Lance stamping his authority" when AC did it, it was labeled "attacking his team"
A man racing a 3 week bicycle race which determines the winner by accumulated time is condemned for going out to gain time. What a pity.
After all is said and done, it doesnt matter anyway. Well it does, all this jitter boosted the coverage and profile for this year's Tour. In the end, the evil means jusitfy the end.
We all love bikes, and this petty dueling helped us receive HD coverage of a Race in France. We couldnt ask for more.