Phonak (cycling team)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Phonak was a Swiss professional road cycling team that existed from 2000 to 2006. It joined the first UCI ProTour in 2005 as one of 20 teams. The team’s notable results include Santiago Botero’s victory at the Tour de Romandie in 2005 and a second-place finish in the ProTour team rankings that year. In June 2006, iShares (a Barclays Global Investors subsidiary) agreed to become the team’s title sponsor from 2007, which would have renamed the squad iShares. But on 15 August 2006 the deal was cancelled after Floyd Landis tested positive for high testosterone, and the team said it would disband at the end of 2006. The team had faced doping issues: in 2004 riders including Tyler Hamilton, Santiago Pérez, Oscar Camenzind, Fabrizio Guidi (cleared) and Sascha Urweider were implicated or accused, and Hamilton crashed out of the Tour de France and was later suspended for blood doping. On 5 August 2006 Landis was dismissed after his post-stage-17 test showed synthetic testosterone, and his 2006 Tour de France win was later stripped by the UCI in 2007. The team was managed by Andy Rihs.