Good news for sprinters: the ProTour is revising (scroll down) it’s scoring system. Robbie McEwen was no doubt down there like “WTF, Mate?” when he first read that a TdF stage win was worth a mere three ProTour points, making it so that winning 9 stages of the TdF (that’d be the most anyone has ever won in a single Tour) was just slightly less valuable than 6th place at Dauphine Libere. Now they’ve been upped to ten points a pop, making it so that breaking the stage wins record is equal to winning the Tour itself, which sounds just fine with me. Speaking of the fast man, both Robbie Mac and Blackout Boonen have extended with their current sqauds (Davitamon-Lotto and Quick.Step,) through at least the 2008 season. Guess we can look forward to more sweet ads as the two squads, and the two riders, continue their rivalry. Too bad the Grand Tour organizers are thinking about reducing the number of days the two will be in their most direct competition.
No doubt many of you remember the glut of Zabel-related stories last week. Well, don’t expect such fanfare for Rolf Aldag, who’s been Zabel’s teamate for 13 years, and is also leaving after this weekend’s Tour of Lombardy. Even the T-Mobile webpage plays down the big classics man’s departure. Questionable for that same race is ProTour champ Danilo DiLuca, who apprently has nagging knee pains. Though the more cynical folks out there might blame it on Diluca’s being lazy after winning a big season objective, the Liquigas rider pledges to race if he’s able, and unveils a highly-ambitious plan for next season. And now, to make this runty paragraph longer, here are some more Interbike trade show reports: one on bikes, and the other on wheelsets you can’t afford (of course, if you read this blog enough, you saw some of them a month ago…). There’s also a story at CNN about CSK Cycles (featured in the first Interbike link) here. It’s poorly reasearched, as mainland China has completely undercut Taiwan’s market for low-end mikes, but it still makes for an interesting 2 minutes and 8 seconds.
