VeloVeritas

It's great to see cycling breaking main stream - a double page colour spread in the Times.

It's almost as if the guy that bank rolls the team, owns the newspaper.

He does?  Oh!

The Times, today.

We're treated to nine examples of marginal gains:

1. Cav and Lance get a kicking for having personalised paint jobs on their bikes - the Pinarellos only have 25% of the frame painted, to save weight.
   With virtually every bike in the peloton nudging the UCI minimum weight restriction, anyway - am I missing something?
2. Sky have the 'most aerodynamic shorts in the game.' Super cool news for those chronos - but when the mud is flying at Het Nieuwsblad...
3. Great lengths have been gone to in order to secure Sky's race radio communications - money well spent when you consider the UCI will ban them, in a year or two.
4. The asymmetrical Pinarello - I love Pinarellos, but how come all bikes up until now haven't gone round in circles when you're stepping on it?
5. I'm not sure if this is an early April Fool; but the bus apparently has a telescopic mast with a strobe light on top, so the riders can spot it after the finish.
   Frans Assez would have run his Flanders team for a year on the price of that.
6. Apparently all sorts of tests were done to come up with the team kit design.
   When I'm even older and writing articles about 'cult cycling jerseys of the past;' Bianchi, Faemino, Peugeot, Brooklyn - Sky? hardly.
7. Mood lighting on the bus, maybe there's a vacancy for a DJ? I've still got all my 80's 12" vinyl.
8. More on the bus - 9 x skype, laundry, electrically obscuring glass, etc.
   Frans could have won classics with that amount of cash.
9. 'The line' statement printed on the kit - so how come all the kit doesn't have it?

I'm sorry for my cynicism, but it's Barcelona, 92, Boardman all over again - that Lotus won the pursuit on it's own.

Bikes and buses don't win races - men do.

Sky's mechanics hard at work on the Dogmas.

I think Sky will have a good year; Boasson Hagen is sheer quality and Steve Cummings is one big, strong under-rated rider: he'll win this year. And that's just two of the squad.

They won their first race and won it well, respect for that.

But let's keep those hype filters firmly in place, readers.

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