Giro D'Italia- The Astana Invitation

The first of the year's grand tours begins this weekend and the organizers have seen fit to invite the top ranked stage racing team, Astana, in an eleventh hour reprive of the snubbing they received in February. At the time, the organizers claimed that Astana would not race the race to win, but rather as preparation for the Tour. It was a curious argument, and one that had yet been used against any team in the history of the race. In reality, the Giro organizers likely took this position to further their cozy relationship with the ASO. Ironically, it was the much maligned ProTour that raised the caliber of racing at the Giro in recent years, bringing it to another level of competition. Nonetheless, RCS saw fit to align themselves with the ASO in their spat with the UCI and have removed themselves from the season long competition. It is with this in mind that the Astana snub seemed much more about politics than about sporting concerns. It seems that after an early season of stage race domination, RCS have recanted their non-invite and have welcomed Astana with open arms a full seven days before the start this weekend, contingent on the participation of the team's trio of stars, Contador, Leipheimer and Kloeden. An invitation made sense all along, but it would seem that if sporting concerns were the reasoning behind the initial snub, a team should be given more than seven days to prepare for a three week race. A grand tour takes months to prepare for properly and if the RCS truly wants the highest level of competition from Astana, a little more advance notice would have been in order. It will be interesting to see how Contador, who has been on vacation, and Leipheimer, who was in down period of his year, will react to three intense weeks of racing. Only Kloeden, having just won the Tour of Romandie, looks to have the form to be competitive and he very well may have left a little too much on the roads of Switzerland, thinking he wouldn't be racing in Italia. Of course, none of the members of Astana can do anything other than express gratitude, lest they continue to be shunned by race organizers, but they have to see how ridiculous it is that they are expected to be competitive on such short notice. While they have every right to be there, it is yet another episode in the Year of the Farce, a year that has seen surprise tests for fathers planning their infant's funeral, a star sprinter being banned for overuse of his inhaler, and now the top stage racing team in the world being given less than a week to prepare for a a three week tour. Luckily, the racing itself has been top shelf, but the powers that be need to get the political nonsense in order if the sport is to come out of its tailspin and come back into the limelight....