Signatures boost likelihood that Mark Cavendish will also race with British ProTeam
Furthering speculation that Mark Cavendish is on his way to Sky Procycling, L’Equipe is reporting today that two of his current team-mates have inked contracts with the British squad.
The French newspaper reports that Milan San Remo winner Matt Goss and Cavendish’s room-mate Bernhard Eisel have signed two year deals with the ProTeam. It says that Dave Brailsford has not yet confirmed this.
Under the contract stipulations of HTC Highroad, its current riders cannot disclose where they are going until tomorrow at the earliest. The team is one of the most successful in the history of cycling, but it is stopping at the end of the year due to the lack of a sponsor for 2012.
Goss has also been linked to the Australian GreenEdge team, which needs big name signings to boost its chances of getting a UCI ProTeam licence in its first year. Apart from his Milan-Sanremo success, which confirmed him as a bona-fide Classics contender, he also took stages in Paris-Nice, the Tour of California and Tour of Oman, won the Cancer Council Helpline Classic in Adelaide and took a stage plus second overall in the Santos Tour Down Under. He has been a team-mate of Cavendish for two years.
Eisel is in his fifth year racing alongside the Manx rider and in that time they have become friends as well as successful team-mates. He won Gent-Wevelgem last year and this season places seventh in both Gent Wevelgem and Paris-Roubaix.
Cavendish has had a very successful time at HTC Highroad, clocking up twenty stages of the Tour de France as well as numerous other victories. He is known to want to keep at least some of his sprint train with him and so reports that Goss and Eisel may have contracts with Sky Procycling appears to boost the likelihood of him also heading there.
He has close links to British Cycling and has long been on its target list in terms of riders it wants for the team. He said several weeks ago that he had made up his mind as to where he would compete in 2012 and beyond, but insisted that he wouldn’t make this public for some time.