Andy stays upright in the TTT ! ! !

Oh, all right, I know, a  little bit of an over-reaction, but I thought we deserved to get excited that Our Andy completed the TTT at Tirreno-Adriatico ( or Terrayno Adriatico as I would spell it, as apparently I am not very good at speeling) without any incidents.

Our tv coverage was a bit restricted here in the UK, as Eurosport only had the highlights - three hours or more of racing was squashed into less than an hour, so we didn't get much time to see each team. All we got of RadioShack was a close-up of Fabian's backside on the start ramp, then a shot of the first rider being shelled off the back of the group - oh look, it's Andy.

This was a bit annoying, but as LLB said at the time, the trouble with being a superstar is that the media will always focus in on you, which means that all your problems and shortcomings are going to be made very public.

It's nice that LLB describes Andy as a "superstar", isn't it? *laughs*  I mean,

The RadioShack website says:

"we...decided not to have Chris and Andy pull today and that we’d work with six riders." 

I  know that team tactics have to be kept within the team, for many reasons, but that is a tactic that it would have been nice to know about beforehand, as it would have avoided all those "oh dear, there goes Andy again, will he even finish the race?" comments from the commentators, who were rude enough to say that at least Andy finished a race last week, "for the first time in about a hundred years" .  Humph!! Cheek!

I'm also very pleased to see that the yellow Livestrong band has indeed been removed from the kit, hooray for that, and in fact the new team photos show Andy looking happier than he has done for a while. In fact, it's a good sign that the website has new photos for everyone, in their new kit: it shows a certain solidarity of sponsorship, don't you think? I always feel sorry for those teams whose websites are clearly out of date, as it makes it feel as though their team doesn't care enough about them to get new photos taken.

Now all we need is to get rid of the word "Radioshack" and get back to Leopard Trek....