The Safi-Pasta Zara team has announced the signing of three more Americans for 2011. Shelley Evans and Sinead Miller are both currently Peanut Butter & Co-TWENTY12 teammates of Mara Abbott, whose transfer to the team was announced last month; Amber Rais is based in Austria, currently racing for Kuota Speed Kueens.
“With these three athletes we have completed the US part of the 2011 formation,” said team manager Maurizio Fabretto. “A technical integration because I consider them some of the strongest riders in the world, but also because of commercial and communicative reasons, linked to the interests of some of our sponsors in the USA.”
Of the three riders Olds is the one to have made the most headlines this year; she began the year by winning four stages and the overall classification of the Tour of New Zealand, later on she won the Pan American Championship, the overall Nature Valley Grand Prix, then took the final stage of the Giro d’Italia (which was won overall by Abbott). She also took a number of other podium places throughout the year, including second in the Liberty classic and a two third places in the Holland Ladies Tour.
Olds also races on the track, taking the bronze medal in the points race at the World Cup in Copenhagen in 2009. Her hopes of a medal in this year’s World Championships were dashed though, when she was brought down in a six-rider crash in the scratch race, landing face first.
Rais 2010 season started badly when she fractured her pelvis in a crash the day before the women’s Tour of Qatar. She recovered in the spring though to take a number of podium places in Austria, then finished 15th in the Giro del Trentino. Miller is the youngest of the trio, at just 20 years or age and has spent much of the year gaining experience in European races, including the spring classics and the Giro d’Italia; she is the reigning US under-23 champion in both the road race and time trial.
“I can confirm that there will be other foreign athletes arriving,” Fabretto added, “with whom we are finalising contracts. Girls who have race with Safi-Pasta Zara-Manhattan this year who are confirmed are Veronese Eleonora Patuzzo, Russian Olga Zabelinskaya, Lithiuanian Olga Cilvinaite and Ukrainian Alona Andruk.”
The team is rumoured to become part of the men’s Geox team in 2011, although nothing has yet been officially confirmed.