Lloyd: BMC is a good place for Cadel

Silence-Lotto's Matthew Lloyd believes his former team leader Cadel Evans is likely to thrive at his new BMC Racing team having made the surprise jump from the Belgian ProTour outfit. "Our team is not obviously totally and 100 percent driven to win the Tour de France as you would say Astana is or your CSCs of the world [are]," Lloyd told The Age newspaper.

"It's a team that is based in Belgium that has other objectives that are as big as the Tour de France as far as they're concerned, which makes it difficult, because if you're the best guy in the world who knows he can win a bike race, it's challenging to know that a team is there and they're probably not going to challenge the best guys," said 2008 Australian road champion Lloyd, who joined the Belgian squad in 2007 to act as a support rider in the mountains to his good friend Evans.

Evans, Lloyd believes, could well thrive in a team that is more focused on assisting him in achieving his goals, particularly at the Tour de France. "From a team perspective it could for Cadel...be a really good place to go. Solely because it gives him the freedom to explore whatever he wants to do and have a team that can back him up," said Lloyd of the world road champion, who produced his poorest ever performance in July.

Asked about the breakdown in relations between Silence-Lotto and Evans, who has been particularly critical of the team's management, Lloyd commented: "To me the relationship between our team and Cadel didn't exactly go through anything bad, it was just a time to change and everyone accepted that."

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