ASO is hilarious. Every year they do something even dumber and this year at the presentation was priceless.
Bruyneel was great talking about how the US had four of the top ten Pro Tour riders and France having four in the top 100. Heck, IMO Moreau is their best rider and he was 79th...their best was Moncoutie at 30th...so his point was that they are simply not good enough. But then the focus is on AG2R and Cofidis. Apparently, many other people were put out by this.
But, as has been the case the last few years, they try to figure out some trick and good riders figure out how to overcome them. Bad ones abandon.
They were right to drop the TTT...since they decided to "socialize" the results by mitigating the time advantages (because the "big money teams have too much of an advantage") it had become comical and stupid.