How does Team Garmin-Chipotle top this year? Even Jonathan Vaughters, the director in charge of improving the Boulder-based cycling team, doesn’t really know.
“If you look at it real objectively, we were the most successful first-year professional cycling team at the Tour de France level ever,” Vaughters said from Boulder on Tuesday. “That’s pretty hard to do an encore on.”
They’re going to try. He has added a few pieces, established a legitimate Tour de France threat in Christian Vande Velde and may have found the mountain man the team has been missing in Dan Martin, 22, nephew of Stephen Roche, the 1987 Tour de France champion from Ireland.
Vaughters will preview his 2009 team for the public Saturday night with the team’s second annual kickoff event at the Boulder Theater.
The core of the team is similar to this year’s team, which established itself as more than just a bunch of guys with an extensive drug-testing program. It won the team classification at the Tour of California and the team time trial at the Giro d’Italia. Vande Velde finished fifth in the Tour de France.
For next year, Vaughters lured away Bradley Wiggins, a five-time Olympic and world championship gold medalist in track cycling this year, from Team Columbia, the other U.S. team at the Tour. Other new cyclists expecting to make contributions are Canadian Svein Tuft, second in the world time trial championship, and Australia’s Cameron Meyer, fourth in the Olympics points race and third in the under-23 world time trial.
“People now have higher expectations, and our goal is to exceed those expectations,” Vaughters said. “We had a real cool message this year, that we can race to the front clean. And we accomplished that. And we showed we can be competitive at the best races in the world doing exactly what we said we were going to do, which was a new group of young riders that weren’t that experienced being leaders.
“So next year we have to dial in the details a little bit.”
That includes getting Vande Velde, a former Boulder resident, on the podium in Paris, and it won’t be easy. He missed third place by 1:52 in July. Alberto Contador, the 2007 champion, will return with seven-time winner Lance Armstrong as a possible teammate on Team Astana, although Vaughters called that arrangement “pretty unpredictable.”
“We’re trying to figure out how to win the Tour,” Vaughters said. “Christian is capable of doing it, but we’re going to have to be real precise. We don’t have an experienced climber to help him in the mountains. Now we’ve probably got the most talented young climber in the world in Dan Martin.”
One change Vaughters is making is in his drug testing program. The Agency for Cycling Ethics, which administered Team Garmin-Chipotle’s weekly drug testing, went out of business last week. Vaughters has already found another, which he won’t reveal until Monday.
A few tickets remain for Saturday’s event. A VIP pre-event cocktail hour with the cyclists costs $250 and begins at 5:30 p.m. The introduction begins at 6:30 and will feature a Sundance Channel film about Garmin-Chipotle at this year’s Tour. Cost for only the 6:30 event is $25. For more information, call 303-444-7500.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
