Radioshack: they are NOT my team.

No sirreee, I am a Leopard fan. Clearly, my favourite Leopard has to be Andy Schleck, and I am a big fan of Frankie (despite his current poisoning problem) not to mention Jakob, Fabian, Jensi and the others.

I wasn't previously a RadioShack fan, not being particularly prone to liking Lance Armstrong: I admire the guy, and have my own opinion about the current doping case, but I'm not a fan.

Then this year, it was hard to like RadioShack, after the truly horrendous way they bought out Leopard Trek, and the unmitigated disaster of not telling the riders, not giving Jensi a contract, etc etc

Then we had the truly appalling things that RadioShack have said to their riders this year, including not paying them, shoving Frankie into the Giro at five days' notice, and the stupid dominance battles over not letting Kim Andersen go to the Tour (and how did that work out for you, Mr Bruyneel? Oh, of course, you weren't there either, were you?).

This behaviour wasn't restricted to just the Leopards: they even shot their own Shack man, Chris Horner, in the foot by telling him that he couldn't ride the Tour - then had to back down due to sponsor pressure, ha ha.

And now with the completely callous way they have dropped Frankie like a ton of bricks - well, I would be surprised if anyone could support them.

So I was heartily amused to read this article in Velonation about the Best Team category, which RadioShack won this year.

It's a good explanation of how a complicated category is determined, and I just laughed and laughed at the ending:

"..the classification will not always be won by the best team."

Too true! I think Sky were the best team in the Tour: best discipline, best consistency, best teamwork, best strategy (allowing that they wanted to win the yellow jersey, not the hearts of the French people) and lots of other "bests".

And what of RadioShack?

Will they even be a team next year? Will half of them (the Leopard half) leave? Only one tiny piece of additional information today - Alpecin, the mysterious possible-new-German-team-sponsor, have suddenly started advertising in the TV coverage of the Tour, and other cycle races. So it does seem that they are putting budget into cycling spheres, which could indicate that they are about to put a lot more money into cycling.

Do we hope so?

Or can we hardly bear the thought of yet more changes, while poor Andy still has a cracked pelvis, and poor Frankie is living the nightmare of trying to prove his innocence.