Shortlist

Most of the ten preselected Movistar Team riders for the Grande Boucle warm up in the Sierra Nevada mountains before this year's French grandtour

With a successful Giro d’Italia done and dusted for Movistar Team with the stage wins by Fran Ventoso and Andrey Amador, the telephone squad is now getting ready for the second of three Grand Tours in their schedule. With one month to the depart of the 2012 Tour de France, the team’s general manager Eusebio Unzué has chosen ten riders to make the shortlist before the definitive nine for the Grande Boucle: Alejandro Valverde, Juanjo Cobo, José Joaquín Rojas, Rui Costa, David Arroyo, Rubén Plaza, Imanol Erviti, Iván Gutiérrez, Vladimir Karpets and Vasil Kiryienka, with Ignatas Konovalovas and David López as reserve riders.

To improve their condition before the Tour, most of the riders preselected, led by Valverde and Cobo, have trained for the last two weeks in the mountains of Sierra Nevada in Granada, before getting back into competition in the two races prior to the French event: the Tour de Suisse and the Critérium du Dauphiné. Training sessiones in the morning and afternoon, chats within the team members, table tennis matches and some time for TV and surfing the Internet but, above all, rest, make the training camp’s planning.

Accompanied by team soigneur Juan Carlos Escámez and mechanic Alexander Gubanov, the Blue squad’s riders will leave the Andalusian sierra as their schedule demands, depending on their participation in the Dauphiné (starting on Sunday) or the Tour de Suisse kicking off on June 9.