An open letter from Johan Bruyneel
Sports Manager, Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team
Thursday, June 22, 2006 Madrid, Spain
Greetings to Cyclingnews readers... We all know that recently there have been some unpleasant happenings in the sport of cycling. But as the 2006 Tour de France gets ready to start, I want to take a moment of your time to talk about the sport that I love, a sport where there are lot of very positive things, and where I see the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team headed.
But before we look to the future, I want to look a little at the past.
When we started in 1999 as the United States Postal Service Team with Lance we had a dream, a vision - a crazy one by some people's thoughts: to win the biggest bike race in the world, the Tour de France, and to focus our efforts on a rider who was just coming back from a very difficult fight against cancer! But we were very dedicated and committed to this goal, in fact we were thrilled to commit ourselves to something as extremely ambitious as this. We had the desire to not leave anything undone and we were extremely passionate.
And just like many new ventures we were inexperienced in the specifics of the task but we were so highly motivated we didn't really care about our lack of experience; we simply had the conviction to succeed! We had no fear of failure, in fact we liked the challenge, and yes we knew that it was a bit of a crazy challenge but we decided to go for it, and we went for it 100% - the only way really that Lance and I know how to do something.
As I looked back on 1999 I realized we had created an experimental formula, and it worked... we won! And over the years we've fine-tuned and repeated this same formula with some amazing results: seven consecutive Tours de France victories as well as championships in the Vuelta España and the Giro d'Italia.
To read the full letter, click here.
