The Tour de France dominates the cycling landscape. Sure, the Spring Classics, the Giro, the Vuelta, and World’s are always important. This year, there’s the Olympics too. But the Tour is The Show and everyone knows it. SRAM started 2008 thinking that our lineup would include the winner and third place overall from last year along with one of the most electrifying young talents in the sport. But things didn’t work out as we’d hoped.

It wasn’t the most glorious Tour for us, but we couldn’t be more proud of the riders from Agritubel who fought tooth and nail every day to survive. Romain Feillu’s day in yellow was wonderful and Eduardo Gonzalo showed promise with a top-40 finish in his Tour debut, but the 5 guys who made it to Paris did so without much fanfare.

Most SRAM components end up on the bikes of regular people with jobs, families, etc. You ride because you love it, and you ride hard. You don’t get any fame or recognition, so you can probably relate better to Agritubel’s Geoffroy LeQuatre (85th on GC) than Carlos Sastre.

It would have been amazing for SRAM to see Alberto Contador or Levi Leipheimer win the Tour de France. But we didn’t get that. Instead, we got the scrappy Agritubel guys. They represented us, and maybe they represented you too.

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