By Susan Westemeyer
The German teams can look back at a reasonably successful Vuelta a España. Milram took three stage wins and T-Mobile two, while Gerolsteiner placed a rider in the top 15.
Milram is technically an Italian team but has a German sponsor. It was looking to star sprinters Alessandro Petacchi and Erik Zabel, and they didn't let the team down. Zabel was the first to strike, winning the seventh stage.
Petacchi won two stages in the Vuelta, maybe helped by the fact that triple winner Oscar Freire had quit the race to prepare for the Worlds. The Italian took stage 11 and stage 12, but then couldn't get another one, finishing third in the 17th stage and narrowly getting second in the finale in Madrid in a drag race against Daniele Bennati, who was the other rider besides Freire to get three sprint wins.
T-Mobile had come into the race with minimal expectations, saying it had no rider for the GC and would look to escape groups. It suffered two unexpected losses in the race. Lorenzo Bernucci was removed from the race after the third stage and dismissed from the team after a positive test for an appetite suppressant. The team's other Italian in the race, Giuseppe Guerini, dropped out due to illness after the 16th stage. It was the 37-year-old's last race before retirement.
The team had good news, too, though, as German time trial champion Bert Grabsch surprisingly won the first time trial by 34 seconds. The team would have been happy with that, but Spring Classics specialist Andreas Klier added to the total. He got in the right escape group in the 13th stage, and out-sprinted Gerolsteiner's Tom Stamsnijder of Holland to win the stage. T-Mobile finished with only five riders in the race.
