The farcical implosion of Giancarlo Ferretti’s 2006 ProTour Sony Ericsson squad is hardly recent news, but I couldn’t help but zero in on one sentence of the February 2006 procycling interview with Ferretti. Now, professional cycling team managers may not necessarily be intellectual peers with Nobel Prize Laureates (although Jonathan Vaughters’ cerebellum may give someone a run for his money…), but there’s definitely a tangible element of brain power required to successfully manage a team. After all, anyone who can get multi-national corporations to cough up millions of euros, anyone who can fill a 20+ rider roster of prima-donnas and convince them to ride as a team, anyone who can deal with the logistics of sending riders and support staff to train and compete all over the globe (very often with squads competing on different continents simultaneously), anyone who can read a race and make split second strategic decisions certainly has their ducks in a row or they would soon be out of work. Which leads me to this jaw-dropper comment from Ferretti in procycling:

procycling: Did you ever get to meet these fictional Sony Ericsson representatives, or try to?
Ferretti: It was all done via email, on this address that I now know must have been made up: ronwestland-sonyericsson@hotmail.com

Holy shit, Ferretti was making multi-million euro contract negotiations with a certain “Ron Westland” hiding behind a hotmail account! Earth to Ferretti, employees of multi-national corporations do not conduct business deals via hotmail accounts. I think someone needs a primer on how “the internets” work. It would be comical if it weren’t such a tragic situation for the riders and staff who got screwed and had to scramble for 2006 employment at bargain basement rates to squeeze onto already brimming team rosters. I hope Ferretti hasn’t since sent gobs of money to Nigerian petroleum companies who need a willing partner to assist in transferring wealth out of the country.