Floyd Landis will ride for OUCH, a re-vamped team formerly known as Health Net-Maxxis.
- By Steve Frothingham
- Published Nov. 21, 2008
- Updated Nov. 23, 2008 at 7:43 PM UTC
Floyd Landis will race next year for the new domestic squad OUCH, a revamped version of the Health Net – Maxxis team.
The team’s title sponsor is the OUCH Sports Medical Center in California. The sports center’s co-founder, Dr. Brent Kay, is Landis’ personal physician and oversaw his hip resurfacing surgery in 2006.
The team, OUCH Presented by Maxxis, will include most of the riders on the 2008 Health Net team, including National Racing Calendar champion Rory Sutherland, Tim Johnson, Roman Kilun, Karl Menzies and John Murphy. The team is owned by Momentum Sports Group and will be managed by Mike Tamayo.
Several members of the team held a short training camp in North Carolina two weeks ago, tied to wind tunnel testing there.
Several other new riders will be announced as soon as next week, team communications director Jeff Sobul told VeloNews on Friday.
Sobul said the UCI Continental-registered team will focus on a domestic calendar similar to Health Net’s schedule, including the Tour of California and the NRC.
Landis is eligible to race at the end of January, at the completion of his two-year suspension for doping in the 17th stage of the 2006 Tour de France. Landis has denied doping and appealed the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. Landis lost that appeal, but maintains his innocence.
FILED UNDER: Road
Steve Frothingham
VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham joined the gang in bike-crazy Boulder in early 2008. He is the former executive editor of the trade magazine Bicycle Retailer & Industry News. He also was a reporter and editor for The Associated Press, where he covered three presidential primaries in politics-crazy New Hampshire. His racing career began on a BMX track in 1980 and reached its zenith with several miserable road races as a category 2 in the early 90s. He subsequently retreated to cat. 3, where he has had a consistently mediocre (at best) record ever since, in road, mountain bike and cyclocross events. Follow him on Twitter at @steve_froth