Luca Guercilena now reveals to Cyclingnews that Frank Schleck and Andy Schleck should not be considered amongst the top Tour contenders yet. Still, he think that the two will be competitive next July.

"There are three or four teams who have devoted more to the Grand Tours, while we're rebuilding. We'll be competitive but it's going to be difficult to be super-competitive because we made different choices on the transfer market to some other teams," Guercilena stated.

"I think that Andy and Fränk themselves can be competitive in a head-to-head with the likes of Froome, Quintana and Contador, but it's premature to say today that we could be capable of going to the Tour to try to win it."

While it is true that teams such as Sky, Movistar and Tinkov-Saxo has garnered significant support for the Tour the Schlecks should not be ruled out just yet. Trek Factory Racing is a very strong riders, and they have plenty of riders that could support the Luxembourgian brothers on the flat and in the mountains. Just consider the hypothetical team that Kiserlovski, Zubeldia, Voigt, Devolder, Popovych, Didier, Vandewalle, and the Schleck brothers, would constitute.

Perhaps Guercilena is just trying to take some of the heat off Andy and Frank?

In any case Guercilena acknowledges that Andy especially had a rough 2013.

"Last winter wasn't ideal, which meant that he began the season trying to make up for lost ground, but he got back to the right motivation and the right way of working from March onwards," Guercilena said to Cyclingnews.

"We had to increase his training load in order to at least be competitive at a Grand Tour. In the space of four months, he ended up doing work that should have been done in eight, and that meant that he had a dip in form after the Tour."

Guercilena also revealed that Horner could in fact have stayed at the American team, but that his salary demand was simply too high.

"I don't think the problem is with Horner but with the market itself," Guercilena said. "Negotiating a contract in October when five teams have gone under is really difficult, and there are a lot of riders out there without teams or valued below their true worth.

"The laws of the market of two years ago are completely different to those of this year, both in terms of the budgets of teams and the number of teams still in operation. It's probably the case that it’s taken a couple of years for the wider economic crisis to hit cycling in earnest."

In any case, lots of good luck to the Schlecks, and lets hope they, and the revived Trek Factory Racing team, will animate next year’s Tour de France.

Also… A big “hrmmm” to Chris Horner, who is apparently demanding a salary so high his own team will not even consider it. Horner might just have won a single victory (albeit a big one), but he seems to be loosing the war.