Description
RadioShack Cycling Team
Team RadioShack was an American professional road cycling team that raced at the top level of the sport during the 2010 and 2011 seasons. The team was announced in July 2009 and was built around Lance Armstrong’s post-Astana comeback, with RadioShack as title sponsor, Trek as bicycle supplier, and Johan Bruyneel as general manager. Cyclingnews reported in November 2009 that Bruyneel had finalized a 26-rider roster from 16 nations for the team’s first season.
The team was, in many ways, a continuation of Armstrong and Bruyneel’s earlier power structure from U.S. Postal, Discovery Channel, and Astana. Its debut roster included Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Andreas Klöden, Chris Horner, Janez Brajkovič, Yaroslav Popovych, Haimar Zubeldia, Sérgio Paulinho, Jason McCartney, Matthew Busche, Tiago Machado, Ben Hermans, Dmitriy Muravyev, and others. It combined veteran Grand Tour riders, American talent, and a handful of young, up-and-coming riders.
RadioShack’s first season was centered on the 2010 Tour de France, where Armstrong hoped to contend again after finishing third in 2009 with Astana. That did not happen. Armstrong’s Tour was effectively undone by crashes and lost time, and the team’s leadership shifted toward Leipheimer and its collective strength. Even so, RadioShack had two major Tour successes: Sérgio Paulinho won Stage 10 into Gap, and the team won the team classification at the 2010 Tour.
The 2010 Tour also produced one of the team’s most memorable visual moments. On the final stage into Paris, RadioShack attempted to start in special black Livestrong-themed jerseys bearing the number 28, a reference to the estimated 28 million people living with cancer. Race officials required them to change back into their regulation kits before the start. Johan Bruyneel was later fined and suspended over the jersey incident.
By 2011, Armstrong had retired from professional racing, and RadioShack’s competitive identity shifted more clearly toward riders such as Chris Horner, Levi Leipheimer, Andreas Klöden, Janez Brajkovič, Matthew Busche, and others. The team’s final standalone season was especially strong in North America. RadioShack won the overall classification at the three major U.S. stage races of the year: Chris Horner won the Tour of California, while Levi Leipheimer won both the Tour of Utah and the inaugural USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Colorado.
The 2011 season turned out to be Team RadioShack’s final year as a standalone American team. In September 2011, Cyclingnews reported that RadioShack and Nissan would join the Luxembourg-based Leopard Trek WorldTour team as sponsors for 2012 and 2013, and that Leopard would retain its WorldTour license while being rebranded as RadioShack-Nissan-Trek. Johan Bruyneel and a group of RadioShack riders moved into that new structure, but the original Team RadioShack entity effectively ended after 2011.
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