Tour de France gets a boost with new sponsors

As the Tour de France kicks off its three-week meander through the French landscape, American race fans will see that Team High Road is now Team Columbia and Chipotle is Team Garmin. Never have two name changes meant such good news for a reeling sport.

Despite a three-year siege of embarrassing doping scandals, these two teams attracted title sponsors in the last month.

Tim Boyle, chief executive of Columbia, said his Portland, Ore.-based sportswear company wants to make inroads into the European market.

Jon Cassat, vice president of communications for Garmin, the Olathe, Kansas-based company that makes portable navigation devices, gave the same reason for taking over Chipotle. "Over 15 million people watch the race in person," Cassat said.

Last year Team Columbia was T-Mobile. The riders wore bright pink and had been stars of the peloton for more than a decade. The team provided such Tour de France winners as Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich -- who it turns out were illegally doping, as was Patrick Sinkewitz of last year's team. As was the almost-winner Michael Rasmussen of Rabobank and big favorite Alexandre Vinokourov of Astana. And they were just the riders caught in a week.

By the end of last year's bumpy ride, T-Mobile had announced it was dropping sponsorship. So did Discovery Channel, which sponsored the American-based team that had fostered Lance Armstrong's greatness.

What the doping scandals did more than drive away fans was drive away the money backing the sport, and the most glaring example was when Discovery walked away and no replacement followed. That, in turn, prompted team manager Johan Bruyneel and part-owner Armstrong to fold up their tents.

T-Mobile was saved when Riverside native Bob Stapleton committed his own money for at least two years and then renamed his group Team High Road.

It costs upward of $11 million a year to field a competitive pro team and Stapleton, who sold his VoiceStream Wireless company to Deutsche Telecom (which became T-Mobile) in 2000, said he believed that much in the sport.

Jonathan Vaughters, a former Tour de France racer, also started a grass-roots team two years ago with the very public plan of being transparently clean.