According to Alberto Contador’s brother-cum-agent, the Spanish stage race ace has no imminent plans to leave Saxo-Tinkoff despite speculations that he might join Fernando Alosonso’s team next season.
“Alberto still has a contract with Saxo-Tinkoff through 2015,” Fran Contador, Alberto’s brother, told Danish newspaper BT. “There are no plans to break that contract.”
Earlier this week, Italian sports daily Gazzetta dello Sport speculated that Contador would leave his current employer at the end of this season to join forces with his friend, Fernando Alonso, who has recently bought the license belonging to the Euskaltel-Euskadi team.
That rumour, however, was also dismissed by Fran Contador when he spoke to BT.
“There’s no substance to that story,” he said. “That story is nothing but a rumour.”
Alberto Contador has had a troubled 2013 season that has consistently seen him fail to reproduce the form that allowed him to sweep away all opposition prior to his doping-related sentence.
During this year’s Tour de France Contador never seriously managed to challenge Chris Froome (Sky) and as a consequence he received heavy criticism from main sponsor Oleg Tinkov.
After the Tour de France it was announced that the co-operation between Bjarne Riis and Oleg Tinkov would be terminated at the end of this season, allegedly as a result of differing views on how to run the team from a sporting perspective.
In accordance with his own wishes regarding his race itinerary, Alberto Contador is not part of Saxo-Tinkoff’s current Vuelta a España squad. Team owner Bjarne Riis had wanted Contador to defend his 2012 Vuelta win, but the Spanish rider preferred an alternative race calendar as preparation for the world road championship race in Florence, Italy, in September.
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