Some news from Trek and some of my own opinions...
George Bennett is out of contract (source: Hayden Roulston twitter). IMO RSLT made a mistake by lining him up for the Giro, they should have had him do the Vuelta instead. A good climber but he spent 1 year getting acustomed to the ProTour and now he got some good results but not enough apparently. Maybe he can turn things around with a win in Colorado but I don't know if that would suffice... He is maybe another victim of Trek re-shifting its focus to the classics, or they are hoping to replace him with Arredondo. On the other hand he would be cheap to keep in comparison to some others and can get good results in the American races that should be important to the sponsor. But it seems they don't really care about those since they are also letting Horner go, according to what a forum-user posted some days ago!
Jesse Sergent has his future secured (source: Dirk Demol on the team website). I assume this means he will stay with Trek. No results in the last two years but showed his class in the Eneco TT. IMO he is too much of a specialist, meaning he needs the exact right course to be successful, and even then there are usually one or two riders better than him. I don't know if he will ever confirm his 2011 season.
It looks like the team is up for a major re-shaping, again. So far they have 5 new riders confirmed, 3 neo pro's plus Felline and Beppu. If they sign the two Van Poppels, which seems likely as there does not seem to be another rumour, it will be 7, plus maybe Arredondo and Kristian Haugaard. With 9 new riders they would again switch out half of the team - a bad decision IMO. But maybe they have to because a lot of riders have better offers, such as Gallopin, Monfort, Nizzolo.
My take on Nizzolo is that I hope they can keep him, and I interprete the signings of Felline and Alafaci as a positive sign, maybe they were signed to work with Nizzolo and become the Italian sprinting force of the team. Otherwise the signing of Alafaci does not make that much sense unless he is part of a sprint train IMO, since he is not at all a winner (a total of 1 win in two years at the Continental level).
Overall the signings are quite "weak" in comparison to their current team, meaning there almost only neo-pros or riders from ProConti teams. The Van Poppels of course would be killer signings but even they are still at the beginning of their career. To me this means that they are trying to widen the team (I think if you have 4 neo-pro's you can have a maximum of 32 riders), and thus compete in more smaller races and hope to get wins there with Felline, Van Poppels, Silvestre, maybe Nizzolo. For example now they had no team in Tour de l'Ain, Burgos, Norway... They have almost only competed at the highest level races all year and gotten almost no results except for Cancellara of course. So my interpretation of their transfer politics is that they are focusing everything on Cancellara while trying to get wins in smaller races.
Or they just have a much lower budget and have to sign "cheaper" riders? I think this is also a big part of it.
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