The 2008 Tour de France race winner Carlos Sastre has announced the first races he will dispute with his new Team Geox TMC, getting his season underway on March 4th in the three-day Tour of Murcia.
“In 2008 I practically started in the Murcian tour, only doing the Clasica Almeria beforehand,” he said, drawing parallels with his most successful season.
“I’ll then ride the Volta a Catalunya and the Vuelta a Castilla and Leon.”
Before all that, he and the team will meet up at a training camp in Vilaseca (Tarragona), running from 8 to 15 January. Sastre and Menchov will leave temporarily in order to attend the Vuelta presentation, which will take place on Wednesday January 12th.
The 2011 season marks a new beginning for the 35 year old, who has ridden well at times in the past two years, but who hasn’t been in his best form at the Tour de France. Having moved from the Cervélo Test Team to Italian/Spanish squad Geox-TMC, he’s hoping to perform well again in that event, but is also a little reluctant to gamble everything on it.
As a result he is considering doing the Giro d’Italia for the third year in a row. The final plan on that is some time off, though, and depends on wildcard status.
“It [the Giro] is something that is not yet decided. Among other things we do not know if the team will be invited. It is true that the way I like it, but first we must know what calendar we will be able to do…then it's time to schedule it.”
The squad applied for UCI ProTeam status and believed that with Sastre and Denis Menchov on board, that it would get a licence to compete at the top level of the sport. However the points of the riders saw it ranked 17th in the UCI’s hierarchy of teams, two places outside that which would have guaranteed it a slot. The UCI awarded just three licences from the five teams between 16th and 20th, and Geox lost out.
As a result it will need to secure invites to all of the World Tour events. The Vuelta a España should be a cert, given Sastre’s popularity at home plus Menchov’s status as a two-time winner of the race, but the others are not guaranteed.
Because of that, the riders will be determined to prove their worth and should be hungrier for success than those on registered ProTeams.