Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Up Around the Bend

I moved to where the weather’s supposed to be good, and I got blowing rain and sand.

My sister moved to where it’s supposed to snow and got cold and snow.

My cousin drove to where it was snowing and apparently spent so much time skiing that he forgot to take any pictures.

But we all know that where the weather really matters these days is in Albuquerque, where Team Astana has set up its winter training camp. Levi and Alberto and Andreas and the boys are riding over the mountains down there in sometimes sub-freezing temperatures, getting their legs in shape for the Tour of California next month and a long race season after that, including the Tour de France in July. Johan Bruyneel has arrived now for the first real team training sessions since last season, when the new echelon was formed from the remnants of Team Discovery. Jani Brajkovic has announced that this year, in addition to defending his title as winner of last year’s Tour de Georgia, he intends to try for a win in the Giro d’Italia.

A few team members headed Down Under earlier this month to test themselves in the Tour Down Under (the first race in this year’s Pro Tour, and the first time the Pro Tour has started outside of Europe), but it looks as if the headliners are all limbering up in New Mexico.

It’ll be fun next month in California to see how well they’ve prepared.

2 comments:

CaliforniaGirl said...

Let's hope they all leave the drugs home this time.

Bill said...

Well, I got the pictures up finally.

I even talked about them a bit, or one can just look at all of them.