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The managers of the Astana team said Friday that they will work tirelessly to keep Alberto Contador on the Kazakh-financed team, despite missing a UCI deadline that might give the defending Tour de France champion the right to terminate his contract. The Kazakh Cycling Federation, which manages the professional team, issued a statement restating its commitment to the sport and its desire to keep the four-time grand tour winner on its roster.

Has Ben Delaney ever been to California? His story on the 2010 Tour of California route begins with "The 2010 Amgen Tour of California will venture high up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, ..."

The new league is part of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA), and is based on the high school mountain biking program established in California, where mountain bike racing has become a varsity high school sport.

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The Astana team has missed a preliminary deadline to file required paperwork as part of the UCI’s annual review of teams’ ProTour status. Astana was one of five teams that missed the October 20 deadline, but may be the one that suffers the most immediate consequences, since UCI rules now allow riders on teams that have missed that deadline to terminate existing contracts.

Trail work is physically demanding and dangerous, but Joey Klein of the International Mountain Biking Association is a 15-years veteran of traveling the globe making singletrack for the rest of us.

Colorado teens will likely get a chance to race in the state's first high school mountain bike league in September next year. Supporters recently formed the Colorado High School Cycling League and plan a fundraising ride this weekend, led by Tom Danielson of the Garmin-Slipstream team. The ride departs at 9 am from the Bácaro Venetian Tavern in Boulder, Colorado.

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The Amgen Tour of California has been a great early season race since its inception in 2006. Its organizers want it to be a great race, period. “We aspire to be an important part of the cycling calendar,” said Andrew Messick, AEG Sports president. “We felt as though being a February race we were, I don’t want to say pre-season, but we weren’t a race that most riders were really targeting.” To be a bigger race, the Tour of California needed two things, Messick said: a mid-season date and access to more climbing.

A traffic investigator told jurors in the Los Angeles road rage trial this week that a driver’s comment at the scene of the incident “was so shocking his words burned into my brain.” Dr. Christopher Thomas Thompson is on trial in Los Angeles Superior Court for assault and other charges related to an incident on a narrow canyon road involving two cyclists on the Fourth of July, 2008. Thompson also faces charges related to a similar, earlier, incident on the same road, involving a different cyclist. If convicted of all charges, Thompson could spend up to five years in prison.

October 14 (Denver, CO) – Buy…Sell…Recycle! The 21st annual Subaru Denver VeloSwap, will be streaming live from this year’s event. The VeloSwap website (www.veloswap.com ) will be picking up live chatter and vendor specials through a twitter feed as well as live updates and interesting facts being broadcast from the VeloSwap floor.

The 2010 Amgen Tour of California will venture high up into the Sierra Nevada, dispense with the traditional prologue, include a time trial in Los Angeles and feature the first mountaintop finish in the race’s history at Big Bear. The biggest change for the eight-day event remains the move from February to May (16-23), pitting it against the Giro d’Italia. Still, race organizers expect a field of comparable strength to 2009, when world champions and former winners of the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix lined up alongside America’s best riders.

World road champion Cadel Evans said Thursday he is considering returning to Australia in January to race the Tour Down Under for the first time since 2005. The Australian two-time Tour de France runner-up said he was considering changing his strategy for 2010 and riding in the Adelaide tour was "highly possible". Evans, who won the elite men's road race at the world championships in Switzerland this month, said he was mapping next year's campaign with Silence-Lotto team chiefs and would confirm his plans early next month.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has announced the release of the 2010 List of Prohibited Substances and Methods (List) which will take effect on January 1, 2010. The List, updated and published annually by WADA, is central to the harmonized, global anti-doping effort and includes input and consultation from anti-doping and scientific experts around the world.

The managers of the Tour de France arrived in Ajaccio, the capital city of Corsica Wednesday to kick off three days of meetings to explore the possibility of starting the race on the autonomous French Island in 2013. "This is the first step of a process to see if the Tour de France can be successfully held on Corsica,” said Tour director, Christian Prudhomme. During a press conference at the Corsican Assembly, Prudhomme said the meetings mark the first of "several trips” that will be necessary to rate the island’s ability to host the 2013 Grand Départ.

Stan Koziatek's garage invention has earned one of the best compliments possible: "Stan's" is now the generic term for tire sealant, in the same way the brand name "Xerox" means "copy" and "Kleenex" means "facial tissue." He's at it again for 2010.

As the 2009 UCI calendar draws to a close, the 2010 spring classics are a faint flicker of pain and glory far off on the horizon. If all goes to plan for team manager Gavin Chilcott between now and then, the U.S.-based BMC Racing Team will line up at the start of the monuments with a good chance of taking one of the world’s biggest one-day titles.

Just as word leaked out beforehand about the route of the 2010 Tour de France, so several sources in Italy have published reports on the likely stages for the 2010 Giro d’Italia — which will be formally unveiled this Saturday in Milan. Race organizer RCS and its daily newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport have announced only the first three stages, which will all start in the Dutch city of Amsterdam next May 8, 9 and 10; but rival papers Tuttosport, La Stampa and La Repubblica have all carried stories on the likely route.

Dear readers, As the last few weeks have shown, perhaps the biggest problem we cyclists encounter is finding a place to just ride. Ever since my “Whose bike path is it anyway?” column two weeks ago, our Mailbag has been filled with letters from readers weighing in on issues of trail access, path etiquette and even horse manure.

Twenty-year-old J.D. Swanguen will serve a three-month suspension for testing positive for pot at doping control at mountain bike National Championships.

Saxo Bank’s Marcus Ljungqvist has announced plans to retire from competition and has accepted a director’s position at the new British-sponsored Sky team. The 35-year-old Ljungqvist said he had weighed several offers to continue riding, including one from the new RadioShack team, but decided it was time to hang up his cleats. "I am truly honored to have received offers in the twilight of my career," said Ljungqvist, "but all things come to an end and after serious reflection, I decided to look for a new challenge."

Katie Compton (Planet Bike) has become the first American to lead the UCI's international cyclocross points rankings. Compton, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, owes her lead to her win at the Treviso, Italy, world cup last month, combined with a string of wins at U.S. UCI races. She has won all seven UCI races she has started this season.[nid:99492] Compton is training in Colorado and will resume racing at the NACT weekend in Colorado next weekend.

Beginning at 9:15 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 25, cyclocross racers from across New York State and New England will converge on the Columbia Pavilion in Spa State Park for the first-annual Saratoga Spa ‘Cross. Cyclocross is a style of bicycle racing that evolved in northern Europe, as a way to keep bicycle racers competing through the fall and into winter, by moving them off of roads and onto muddy paths and open fields. The sport is now a popular way for many bicycle racers to end a season of road or mountain bike racing.

With most dividing issues there usually ends up being some sort of compromise solution, so here is mine for race radios.

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The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced Tuesday that downhill racer J.D. Swanguen has accepted a three-month suspension from competition after testing positive for a metabolite of marijuana at this year’s national championships. A urine sample provided by the 20-year-old Swanguen at the USA Cycling national mountain bike championships on July 19 of this year tested positive for Carboxy THC, a metabolite of cannabis.

Nick Wieghall (California Giant Berry Farms) ensured there would be no repeat men's winners yet this year, while Kristi Berg (Redline Bicycles) made it three for three at the sand-heavy course third stop of the Seattle Cyclocross Series.

Two cyclists were looking for a fight before an incident that led to assault charges being filed against a California driver, the driver's attorney suggested in court Monday. The attorney for Dr. Christopher Thomas Thompson also suggested that one of the cyclists may have simply fallen on his own accord. Thompson is on trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and other violations in connection with a July 4, 2008, confrontation in a Los Angeles area canyon and an earlier incident involving a cyclist on the same road.

Spanish team Fuji-Servetto will ride on in the 2010 season thanks to a new title sponsor coming on board under its new name, Footon-Servetto. The team announced Tuesday the arrival of new title sponsor, Footon, a Swiss-based company specializing in foot insoles and other health care products. The news comes as the team’s future looked bleak.

16-year-old gravity phenom Neko Mulally is ready for his first year on World Cup circuit and the mountain bike Worlds at Mont Ste Anne.

Former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich on Tuesday brushed off the latest doping allegations against him and repeated his position that he will speak only when he is ready. On Monday, German magazine Der Spiegel cited a police investigation report which states Ullrich went to Madrid 24 times between 2003 and 2006 to see doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, the Madrid gynecologist at the center of the Spanish probe Operación Puerto.

Despite its ProTour status for 2010 being still up in the air, Astana continues to bolster its squad for the upcoming season. Italian workhorse Paolo Tiralongo revealed he’s signed a two-year deal to join the Kazakh-backed team while Aussie sprinter Allan Davis confirmed he’s seriously considering an offer to join Astana despite having one more year on his contract with Quick Step. Meanwhile news media in Kazakhstan reports that two time Giro winner Gilberto Simoni may, too, be poised to sign with the team.

Navigation systems manufacturer Garmin Ltd. has announced plans to extend its sponsorship of the Garmin-Slipstream team, adding three years to a deal that was set to expire at the end of 2010. Citing the team’s performance and its commitment to “ethical sporting and developing the next generation of cycling champions,” the company said its sponsorship for the past 18 months has exceeded expectations.

There were a number of special bikes that I saw at Interbike that I have still not had much opportunity to write about. So I’ll use this week’s column to do so.

With the introduction of two new helmets for 2010, Rudy Project is taking a stab at the top of the helmet hierarchy, and hoping riders will take notice. “In essence, we’re calling 2010 the ‘year of the helmet,’” said Paul Craig, Rudy Project's North America CEO. “It’s the culmination of two to three years of research, development, and testing which has allowed us to leapfrog, in our eyes, other helmet technology.”