With three stage wins in the bag already and Mark Cavendish still mathematically a possible winner of the Maillot Vert, the HTC Columbia team has had another strong Tour de France. Losing Mark Renshaw yesterday due to disqualification for sprint irregularities undoubtedly put a dampener on Cavendish’s thirteenth Tour stage win of his career, but the team is certain to fight on to Paris and aim to top the podium at least once or twice more.
Stage victories are a motivation in themselves, but the squad has an extra incentive to do well; according to De Telegraaf, the manager Bob Stapleton is currently in negotiations with internet giant Google about backing the team.
Stapleton is a hugely experienced businessman, who sold his communications company VoiceStream Wireless in 2000 to Deutsche Telekom for $50 billion. This created links with the latter’s T-Mobile brand, and the Californian later began running the women’s programme. He was called to take over the men’s outfit after Jan Ullrich’s exclusion from the 2006 Tour de France, and made sweeping changes to the team. Since then he has acquired backing from Columbia Sportswear, HTC telecommunications and, more recently, the internet telephony company Skype.
“It would be great if a big company like Google enters the sport,” said Stapleton. “It would really give the sport an international boost. But right now we are not fully aware of how the sponsorship might work.”
Just before the start of the Tour de France, Stapleton and the team announced that there would be a technology and marketing collaboration with Google, which would join forces with HTC and SRM to feed data about the riders to fans and viewers.
This would include conveying parameters such as speed, heart rate and power output, and intermixing this with applications such as Google Maps, Street View, My Tracks and Google Earth.
"Google and HTC are ideal partners to further develop the sport of cycling and present it to a worldwide audience in an engaging way," explained team owner Bob Stapleton then. "The interest of such innovative partners is very encouraging and we look forward to continuing to develop this project in the future."
Former US Postal rider Dylan Casey is a product manager with Google and he has been an important link between the company and Stapleton.
If the sponsorship deal is sealed, it would bring additional capital to the American ProTour squad. It is reportedly in advanced negotiations with Mark Cavendish to extend his contract with the team. He has been the most successful sprinter in the sport for the past few years and should be one of the favourites for this year’s world championship.