T-MOBILE signs off

T-MOBILE, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, and the sponsor of the biggest professional cycling team in world, announced last week that they were pulling the plug on the sponsorship three years early.

While the announcement caught everyone by surprise, everybody knew that the program was on life support by the time former rider Patrick Sinkiwitz was tested positive for testosterone during this year’s Tour de France. I was really hoping that T-MOBILE would at least honor the 2008 season, but they didn’t.

T-MOBILE the company was founded in 1990, the same year they wanted to be in cycling. In its first Tour de France, it had to join forces with another team to be given a ride. But the team soon grew and money came pouring in. In 1996, they acquired Bjarne Riis, a reed thin, balding Dane who’d go on and topple the 5-year TdF  reign of Spanish great Miguel Indurain like Big Mig was a neo-pro. Curiously, while Riis won the Tour, the floodlights fell on his teammate and German Wunderkind, Jan Ullrich, who almost beat Riis in spite working hard for the Dane. Ullrich would win the Tour the following year when Riis faltered. Everybody cycling fortune teller said that the 23yo Ullrich to rule cycling for the next decade or so. But bad decisions, bad acquaintances and a cancer survivor from Texas would relegate the German to 5 second place finishes in the next decade.

Despite his failures, T-MOBILE faithfully supported Ullrich’s quest for cycling’s Holy Grail. But in 2006, the Operation Puerto drug scandal exploded with Ullrich’s name all over the mess. T-MOBILE blamed the current management, fired Ullrich and handed the management of the team to a new group led by American Bill Stapleton, whose communication business, VOICESTREAM WIRELESS, was bought by T-MOBILE for $50 billion a few years back.

T-MOBILE, who is partly owned by the German government, wanted to clean up the team and through Stapleton, instituted an overt in-house drug test. Apart from T-MOBILE, only one other team, team CSC, a team managed by Riis, was publicly putting an in-house drug test.

T-MOBILE’s anti-drug policy looked great at first Stapleton as signed in guys who were known as “clean” riders and jettisoned the questionable ones. He also kept the German Sinkiwitz, who used to be a promising rider and a solid all-arounder.  But just a few weeks before the 2007 TdF, the domino started to fall when 6 riders (of 9) from the 1996 squad confessed to using EPO. Bjarne Riis, Christian Henn, Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel, part of that dirty 1996 squad, ‘fessed up. But the big fish on that squad, Ullrich would continue to deny that he doped. Curiously, Aldag, was a current team director of T-MOBILE and despite his confessions, Stapleton would keep him. Henn, who was also a director for another staunch anti-doping team, GEROLSTEINER, was also allowed to keep his job. It seemed like a double standard was going on in the sport. But in Germany, doping is like a scarlet letter. Stapleton says it’s like Barry Bonds fifty times! With Sinkiwitz and the doping scandals going on at the Tour, two TV stations stopped covering the Tour.

I think that T-MOBILE would have continued but recent Sinkiwitz revelations to a German magazine that he started doping with EPO in 2003 when he was with QUICKSTEP and blood doping 2 years later when he was with T-MOBILE was more than the German company could endure. ADIDAS and AUDI, both minor sponsors of the team, followed suit.

I don’t know about the financial situation with the team but Stapleton says that the team, renamed as “HIGH ROAD”, has enough money to race for the next 2 years. I’m sure that until Stapleton can find another sponsor, he’ll have to dig from his pockets to finance the team which can cost from 12-18 million Euros annually.

It was sad to see T-MOBILE go with all the buzz it created. Now, all we hear is static.