Originally Posted by
BluesDawg
This is your idea of a "mediocre at best" team? With General Manager Johan Bruyneel?
The 2009 Astana Cycling Team:
Lance Armstrong, Assan Bazayev, Jani Brajkovic, Alberto Contador, Valeriy Dmitriyev, Aleksandr Dyachenko, Jesús Hernández, Chris Horner, Maxim Iglinskiy, Roman Kireyev, Andreas Klöden, Berik Kupeshov, Levi Leipheimer, Steve Morabito, Dmitriy Muravyev, Daniel Navarro, Benjamín Noval, Sérgio Paulinho, Yaroslav Popovych, Bolat Raimbekov, Gregory Rast, Sergey Renev, José Luis Rubiera, Michael Schär, Tomas Vaitkus, Andrey Zeits, Haimar Zubeldia.
+1 I read Bruyneel's book "You might as well win" that chronicles his years with Lance. Bruyneel is a master at the game and Lance the perfect partner. Bruyneel's point is that if you plan to do something like race the TdF, you might as well do what is necessary to win and put in the extra effort. That extra effort was very significant and reading what they did to prepare seemed not humanly possible from a logistic, travel, training and recovery point of view. They were consumed and driven by the one event to the detriment of everything else in their life - no compromises no excuses. And Bruyneel held Lance BACK so that he did not win too many stages to control the media and take focus off of Discovery.
Lance stopped racing because he was not prepared to do what was necessary yet again for the 8th win. Let's see if he decided to put in the required effort for this year.
BTW, Lance is exactly where he should be for weight and power. It is too early in the season to be a full power and skinny. He would not be able to maintain that until July. It is only possible for a pro cyclist to hit a peak for about two weeks once per year which is exactly how he won 7 races in a row.