* Only three Catalan riders will remain in the same UCI team for 1999. They are the sprinter Angel Edo in Kelme-Costa Blanca (UCI ranking, 84); Gines Salmeron in Vitalicio Seguros (UCI 354); and the ITT specialist Jaume Hernandez in Festina (UCI 542).
* Melcior Mauri (UCI ranking: 55) will move from ONCE-Deutsche Bank to the new Portuguese team Bemfica. He is expected to be the team leader. At Bemfica he will be accompanied by spaniard David Plaza (Cofidis, UCI ranking 301) and Portuguese riders Paulo Ferreira (Maia, UCI 473) and Quintiho Rodrigues (Recer, UCI 506). Another Catalan rider, Daniel Bayes, will begin his professional career at Bemfica.
* The Balear rider Toni Tauler (UCI 724) will move from Italian Ros-Mary to Spanish Kelme-Costa Blanca. Tauler is an ITT specialist, and this year got a 5th place in one of the Giro d'Italia ITT stages.
* Francesc Leon who has been riding at the colombian team Avianca-Telecom, will ride in 1999 for Kelme-Costa Blanca. Leon was the first Catalan rider on the final classification of the 1998 Volta a Catalunya. Avianca was a kind of second team for Kelme-Costa Blanca, made up with Colombians and a few young Spaniards. As the team disappears, all the Spaniards move to Kelme (Pascual-Llorente, Aitor Gonzalez and Requejo), as it will do Colombian Castelblanco. There is dispute over a double contract with young Colombian Victor Hugo Peña between Kelme and Vitalicio.
* Joan Llaneras, the world track champion, finishes his contract with American US Postal. He would like to continue alternating track and road. The sprinter and ITT specialist was expected to be one of the leaders of the new team Detec Competition. But now appears unlikely that Detec will race in 1999.
* Ramon Medina is an elite rider who has contract with Vitalicio Seguros. Medina is a classics (one day races) and small group sprints specialist. This year won both the Spanish and the Catalan official rankings and got a 724 place at the UCI ranking. On the absolute Spanish road championships got the 9th place, well before most of the UCI riders, and won stages at international 2.6 races like Barcelona-Montpellier, Volta a Lleida, Volta a Tarragona and Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana. He was 5th at the final classification of the Barcelona-Montpellier (2.6), a stage race won by Ivan Basso, with Hushovd in 4th place.
* Finally, five elite Catalan and balear riders got a promise of UCI contract with the supposed to be new team Detec Competiton. But now it seems unlikely that the will begin the 1999 calendar. Last news talk about that the sport director Pedro Muñoz is looking for sponsors to save the project as a personal cause. The riders involved are the elites Josep Jufre, Carles Torrent, Joan Horrach, Eloi Coca and Xavier Llamas, as well as the UCI rider Joan Llaneras. Three of them are from the Girona province where the sports director Pedro Muñoz lives.
Josep Jufre is 2nd in the Catalan ranking and 5th in the Spanish, this year finished 4th at the final classification of the stage race Circuito Montañes (UCI 2.5) Because of this result got a 993 place at the UCI ranking. In 1996 he had the opportunity to run half year at the UCI team Santa Clara.
Carles Torrent is a classics (one day races) and small groups sprints specialist. Is 3rd on the Catalan ranking and 15th in the Spanish and 818 on the UCI ranking. This year Torrent got the 10th place at the absolute Spanish road national championship, and 3rd at the Volta a Tarragona (2.6).
Eloi Coca is 4th at the Catalan ranking and 25th at the Spanish, this year was 8th at the Volta do Futuro de Portugal and 2nd ath the Volta a Tarragona.
Both Torrent and Coca where first expected to race with US-Postal (even in 1998 as stagiares), Johny Weltz who lives in the Girona province knew well the possibilities of both riders and was keen to give them an opportunity, but his defeatment closed this possibility.
Xavier Llamas was involved last year in a similar situation. He has a contract with Russian Lokosphinx but finally the team asked the rider to "pay per ride" (this is to say, you have not salary unless you get your own personal sponsor), so went back to elite races. He has said to the press that he will quit cycling if Detec does no ride in 1999.
* There is a question about why if Catalan cyclists are amongs the best Spanish elite and under-23 riders they have very few opportunities to pass to UCI teams. The fact is that this year Catalan federation won the official regional ranking and that Catalan riders got the 1st, 5th and 15th places at the Spanish ranking.
A possible answer comes in two directions. On one side the Spanish event calendar is made up of one week stage courses, allways with mountain clims. So the teams prefer mountain climbers both to win races and to help the team leaders in the great three weeks tours. But Catalan riders have always been good specialists on sprints (from mythical Poblet to Edo), classics (again from Poblet to Mauri) and ITTs (from Pesarrodona to Mauri or Hernandez). It means that Catalan riders does not fit with Spanish teams needs and should look for opportunities outside Spain: Hernandez in Festina, Salmeron in Saeco, Tauler in Ros-Mary, Llaneras in US-Postal, and others.
On the other side, there are no Catalan sponsors and no Catalan sports directors. In fact most of the Spanish UCI teams have a regional biass especially when it comes to young new professionals: Kelme in Valencia, Estepona-Deporpublic in Madrid and Castilla, Banesto in the Basque Country and Castilla, not to talk of explicit cases like Euskatel-Euskadi etc. Moreover, sports team directors prefer riders from his own region.
1. Beat Wabel (Swi) GS K2-Proflex 58.02 2. Thomas Frischknecht (Swi) Team Ritchey 0.07 3. Kamil Ausbuher (Cze) 0.48 4. Patrick Blum (Swi) GS Saeco-Wheeler-Pneuhaus Frank 0.53 5. Thomas Kalberer (Swi) 1.19 6. Beat Blum (Swi) GS Saeco-Gerber-Pneuhaus Frank 1.39 7. Peter Novy (Cze) 2.15 8. Stefan Bünter (Swi) GS-Diamondbach-Racing-VC Bauma 2.31 9. Vaclav Metlicka (Cze) 2.52 10. Tom De Kort (Bel) 3.08 11. Paul van Loon (Bel) 3.22 12. Thomas Steiger (Swi) GS Flatera-RV Uster 3.22 13. Matthias Kern (Swi) GS Fumo-Velo-Weidmann 4.49 14. Urs Steinmann (Ger) 5.03 15. Dietmar Stari (Aut) 5.15 16. Marco Zingg (Swi) GS Zingg Zweiradsport 5.30 17. Björn Schwengeler (Swi) Team Fixträger A 5.54 18. Thomas Clark (USA) 6.10 19. Roger Zweifel (Swi) GS Schumacher-Wetzikon 6.25 20. Fabrizio Margon (Ita) 6.41 21. Johannes Müller (Aut) 6.52 22. Christian Trafelet (Swi) GS Cilo-Bassano/RV Wetzikon 7.07 23. Michael Lingua (Swi) Madimec-RV Zürich 7.35 24. Richard Chassot (Swi) Swiss-Post-Team + 1 lap Started: 33 Finished: 24 9 LapsThanks to Stefan Girschweiler at http://www.radquer.ch/ and Theo Muller for the results