About
Poor Alberto Contador. He won the Tour de France in 2007 with Discovery Channel. The team disbands after that, but Contador gets on a new team sponsored by a consortium of Kazakstan Corporations named Astana after the capital of Kazakstan. The team is basically a new continuation of Discovery Channel with much of the same teammates and the same Manager Johan Bruyneel.
In a politcally charged decision the organizing body of the Tour de France , the Amaury Sports Organization (A.S.O.) did not invite the Astana team to any of the events it organizes including the major race on the calendar the Tour de France. This is despite the fact that Astana is a ProTour team that should get guaranteed entry to many of those events. The politics comes from a power play between the A.S.O. and the Union Cicliste International (UCI) the governing body of Cycling.
Alberto is therefore out of luck twice. He cannot defend his Paris-Nice or Tour de France wins of 2007.
The troubled years of the former Liberty Seguros/Astana teams of 2006 and 2007 have no real relation to the current team. The only thing similar to 2007’s Astana Squad is the main sponsor name. Therefore it seems unjust for the current racers on Astana to suffer for the sins of totally unrelated racers.
The idea to create this site came after seeing that Levi has a pretty nice site made by Trek, but Alberto has a very bad site with poor English translations. I had to do something… Thanks to Interbike Times and Bike Snob NYC for the inspiration.