Spain: Every morning on the Tour of Spain, as crowds gather at the start of each stage, Euskaltel-Euskadi press officer Jesus Aizkorbe stands at the top the stairs of his team bus and hands out posters.
“There’s a lot more interest here than there used to be a few years back,” Aizkorbe said as he passed the posters to a sea of outstretched hands.
“So it’s a pity we’re quitting now.”
Like Euskaltel’s 29 riders and 24 staff, Aizkorbe will be out of a job in 2014 because the team are set to fold at the end of the season after 17 years in the sport.
Spain will be left with just one team at WorldTour level and the Basque Country, considered Spain’s cycling heartland, will be bereft of its longstanding flagship squad.
“We’re not quite running around the other teams here with curriculum vitaes sticking out of our back pockets,” team manager Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano said. “But almost.”
Nine months ago Euskaltel-Euskadi’s orange-clad riders looked like one of the most financially secure teams in cycling with Euskaltel, a Basque telecommunications company, looking set to back the team for a further four years.
But after Euskaltel’s co-sponsors failed to provide expected funding, the telecommunications company announced this year it was pulling out of cycling, making the 2013 Vuelta the team’s last Grand Tour after nearly two decades in the sport.
“I’m trying to live through this one like it was just another race,” Samuel Sanchez, the 2008 Olympic champion and team’s best known rider, said as he signed autographs outside the bus.
Reuters
