T-Mobile out

Oh hell.

T-Mobile ends sponsorship; teams to continue with new name

The T-Mobile cycling program has lost its title sponsor, but the American director of the men’s and women’s teams said Tuesday that both will continue to operate with private support.

…”We arrived at this decision to separate our brand from further exposure from doping in sport and cycling specifically. This was a difficult decision given our long history of support for professional cycling and the efforts of Bob Stapleton in managing the team in 2007,” said Hamid Akhavan, CEO of T-Mobile International and a member of the Deutsche Telekom board of directors.

“We have an obligation to our employees, customers and shareholders to focus our attention and resources on our core businesses. We have worked very hard with the current team management to promote clean cycling sport, but we reached the decision to continue our efforts to rid all sports of doping by applying our resources in other directions.”

Source: velonews.com

Talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop….

From: Humpty
Subject: Another one bites the dust….
Maybe Hincapie will ride for RIDECLEAN??

Yeah, if they’ll have ’em.

And I’m guessing they wouldn’t.

Update: Good write up over at velonews.com on the history of T-Mobile.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

7 Replies to “T-Mobile out”

  1. …here we go…a few sponsors have talked about the issue w/out getting overly definitive but deutsche telekom put it into terms even the most idiotic “pro” can understand…

    …”TO SEPARATE OUR BRAND FROM FURTHER EXPOSURE FROM DOPING IN SPORT & CYCLING SPECIFICALLY”…

    …one of the biggest, most successful & longstanding teams in cycling takes months to deliberate over the issue & yet still decides to pull the plug on a contract that would have run until the end of 2010…the decision comes despite the serious commitment by bob stapleton to run a clean program…

    …would it be rude to say “the shit has hit the fan” ???…

    …just askin’…

  2. um…i think the recent spate of “another ride tests positive” has finally gotten through to the corporate mindset.

    i have to refer to every fucking cycling magazine out there which has half of its pages dedicated to doping and when they talk about a rider in an article not related to doping they proclaim how clean he is or how he is a suspect or what have you.

    if you had some millions sitting around would you sponsor a sport which is consumed with an ongoing doping scandal that casts a shadow on every conversation? shit man tennis looks pretty good. oops, i hear that some matches were thrown. maybe kickball would be a good outlet.

    road racing in its attempt to come clean is revealing that the dysfunctional set of unchecked powers without clear chains of authority pretty much guarantees this will be without end.

    this will take an entire generation to pass.

  3. “this will take an entire generation to pass.”

    In the meantime, old guys on singlespeeds will rule the cycling world. Let’s call it “The Greatest Generation.” All your podium girls are belong to us. We could have a few beers to celebrate.

  4. I will be buying all the T-mobile gear I can find, seeing as it will be collector’s items in the not-too-distant future.

    Pepto-pink never looked to good.

  5. you really think Hincrappie can hang with the RideClean boys? Sure he can smoke them up the mountains, but can he do it after a binder of whiskey and strippers the night before?

    pro road racing just sucks.