- Feb 20, 2010
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Ancares said:
They were better than Brétagne-Schuller, but it is not reasonable to expect a team in its first Pro-Continental year to contend with Skil, Androni, Farnese or TSV, who've been at that level for years, and can guarantee invites to at least some major season targets. And they can sign up talented riders knowing this (riders like Rujano going to Androni because he knows he'll get a Giro berth, Visconti staying with Farnese meant that they could guarantee the invites with him around), which wasn't really an option for Caja Rural. And bear in mind that as an amateur team they themselves were something of a feeder for what is now Movistar (hence why Michal Kwiatkowski was on the team); with Movistar prising away their top riders, Caja Rural looked to the Portuguese riders to step up.
Broco and Cardoso could well benefit from the move. The Portuguese calendar is at least historically quite well-paying, but the calendar is not ideal for riders of their skill-sets; there are few truly mountainous races. The GP Liberty Seguros often climbs up to Santa Helena, and the GP PAD has included Torre in the past, but none of the races in the south of the country are suited to them except maybe Algarve, but then they're likely to be pushed to the periphery because of the top names coming in. A pure climber is much more likely to have success in the Spanish calendar, where they may be asked to sink or swim against the ProTour teams at Catalunya and País Vasco, but there will be opportunities for the climbers to show what they're made of at Castilla y León, Asturias, Burgos, Madrid and the myriad hilly one-day races like Amorebieta, La Rioja, Primavera, and the GP Miguel Induráin. You only need to look at Mosquera's results from 2003-4 in Portugal compared to 2005 with Kaiku, when he got to race events more suited to him.
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