It begins today. Extreme Makeover Discovery Channel season.
The top United States-based cycling team is rebuilding around talented but tarnished Italian rider Ivan Basso and is looking for a new title sponsor after the cable television company Discovery Channel announced last week it would not renew its contract with the team after this season.
As the second Amgen Tour of California professional cycling race -- a 650-mile, eight-stage trip from San Francisco to Long Beach -- begins today with a time trial that ends at iconic CoitTower, it will be without defending champion Floyd Landis.
Landis was the Californian who thrilled the cycling world last summer with his brave win at the Tour de France then disappointed much of the same world when he was accused of illegal doping.
Landis' former team, Phonak, was supposed to have a new, San Francisco-based sponsor this year. Instead it is gone, disappeared when the new sponsor withdrew its support in the face of the Landis accusations.
And all the beauty, angst and controversy that have marked cycling over the last several months can be seen up close with Discovery. After Lance Armstrong's retirement in 2005, team technical director Johan Bruyneel tinkered with, but didn't overhaul, Discovery's personnel.
After Discovery failed to place a rider in the top 10 at the 2006 Tour, the team, managed by the Armstrong-owned Tailwind Sports, made the two splashiest off-season acquisitions -- Basso and American Levi Leipheimer. But without a sponsor willing to commit to spending more than $15 million a year, star power won't matter.
The signing by Discovery of Basso, runner-up to Armstrong in the 2005 Tour de France, came after he had been suspended from the 2006 race along with eight other riders when his name was linked to a Spanish doping investigation.
Later in the year the Italian cycling federation cleared Basso and no charges have been forthcoming. Still Basso's old team, the Danish-based CSC, did not offer Basso a new contract.
Bobby Julich, a well-respected American rider who was a mentor to Basso on CSC, said it would be "strange" to race against Basso.
"I do respect Ivan as a person, a cyclist, a father," Julich said. "About the doping, nothing was ever decided so it's just hard for me to form an opinion. I can't say whether I would have signed him on my team or whether Discovery should have. I just don't know."
