Last week High Road Sports announced that the team was disbanding. Team manager Bob Stapleton noted that Team HTC-Highroad would dissolve at the end of the 2011 season after a failure to find a new sponsor. Title sponsor HTC’s contract had ended.
We at KineticShift are sad to see the team break up, but it has been an interesting ride for High Road, but also for the partnership between mobile phone makers and carriers and professional cycling. HTC is just one example, and from 1991-2003 was actually Team Telekom, after the Deutsche Telekom. From 2004-2007 it was T-Mobile-Team, and then after a period of non-phone sponsorship it called up HTC in 2009 when it first became Team Columbia-HTC followed by Team HTC-Columbia before this year’s HTC-Highroad.
Nor is this the only team with a phone company in its history, as the old American 7-Eleven Team, the first major pro cycling team, became Motorola in 1991 and lasted until 1996. It should be added that it was during the Motorola era that professional cycling first saw the use of two-way radios – built by Motorola of course – between riders and the team cars. Lance Armstrong, who rode for Motorola before joining U.S. Postal Service – later U.S. Postal Service-Discovery Channel and then just Discovery Channel – used race radios during his seven straight wins at the Tour de France. Today nearly everyone uses the race radios, just one influence that mobile phones have had on the sport of cycling.
HTC, which followed T-Mobile, isn’t the first former mobile phone sponsor either. Bouygues Telecom had sponsored a team from 2005-2008, and then in the 2009 and 2010 seasons as Bbox Bouygues Telecom. This team today lives on as Team Europcar, surviving where High Road was unable to do so.
But even with the loss of HTC and Bbox Bouygues Telecom, mobile phones and carriers will continue to play a role in cycling. The Basque cycling team Euskaltel-Euskadi entered the pro arena in 2005, after previously being in the Division I and Pro Tour categories.