The brothers added a French climbing master and Tour stage winner, Brice Feillu, came aboard the team — called the Luxembourg Pro Cycling Project — to assist in mountain stages. Australia’s Will Clarke and Austrian Stefan Denifl also made the switch.

Team Luxembourg also snagged name star Stuart O’Grady this week, joining Jens Voigt on the roster of riders known as supreme team players as well as individual standouts. Both O’Grady and Voigt also have the respect of the peloton, especially Voigt after his stirring comeback from a devastating (and some thought career-ending) face plant on a screaming downhill in the 2009 Tour.

And there’s more: Italian sprint specialist Daniele Bennati gives the team added dimension on flat stages, which will be given an additional huge boost when the locomotive-like Fabian Cancellara meets expectations of joining the Schleck enterprise.

Andy Schleck finished second in this year’s Tour by a mere 38 seconds and may be awarded the crown if winner Alberto Contador’s provisional suspension for doping is made permanent.

More from BicycleNet.

Radios were banned from this year’s criterium-style race, a smallish 10-mile circuit that the pros mind-numbingly traversed for more than six hours. Talk about the mobile equivalent of riding an indoor trainer.

Lacking radio contact, the peloton didn’t even realize that they were in danger of being lapped — which would have disqualified the favorites in the flat-to-hilly event and made a mockery of cycling’s premier individual race. Only when an old–fashioned motorcycle monitor flashed the old–fashioned card showing the diminishing gap did the peloton get goosed into protecting its status.

But no radios also meant that teamwork was out of the picture as well, leaving the race a chaotic series of pointless attacks and burn-outs. Pre-race favorites like Fabian Cancellara, Mark the Mouth Cavendish and Philippe Gilbert, who had modeled his entire season around the worlds, simply blew apart, having little support, no indication of how other riders were doing, and no ability to form in-race partnerships to improve their chances.

Even the TV announcers were completely caught off guard when the big group caught all the other riders in the final minute of the race. They were practically speechless. Without radio communications they had no ability to draw the big picture about how the peloton caught up so quickly.

Hardly anyone expected the rider who eventually won — Thor Hushovd — to be No. 1 across the line, simply because his stats would not have suggested it this year, especially given the competition on paper. Indeed, Hushovd won simply by sitting with the pack and turning on the guns in a sprint finish that Cavendish or Gilbert normally would have won, if they’d been around to provide any competition. Taking nothing away from Thor’s rainbow jersey, there wasn’t any strategy involved. He just got lucky by being in the right place at the right time.

Abetted by the lack of radio as well.

Depriving the race of radio might have seemed like a clever change-of-pace experiment aimed at making the event more competitive and unpredictable. Unfortunately it simply injected mass chaos and a distinct lack of drama into the event. Radio is here to stay. It ultimately makes the race more strategic and exciting. Let’s hope the boneheaded retro idea of banning it is dead.

Thor Hushovd, the God of Thunder, took the stage win in a battered sprint, and Fabian Cancellara reclaimed the yellow jersey with a pounding out of the final kilometers of cobblestones mixed with pavement.

But the day will be remembered most for innumerable bike breakdowns and crashes, including one that left last year’s No. 5, Frank Schleck, writhing on the ground holding his head in pain and apparently a question-mark for continuing. [UPDATE: Schleck withdrew with a broken collarbone.] We wish him the best. And Tyler Farrar as well, who despite a broken wrist continued through today’s punishing stage in hopes of healing on the bike and eventually challenging in sprint stages.

Frank’s brother Andy, a pre-Tour favorite, hooked up with teammate Cancellara, a cobblestone specialist, to provide the day’s drama as Saxo Bank vied for the win.

You have to applaud Ryder Hesjedal as well, the big Canadian who, as a former mountain biker, knows how to handle the cobbles. Ryder (who also possesses the best first name in cycling) did a thrilling breakaway over the cobblestones to put pressure on the peloton and show how a breakaway is done.

Best line of the day: Commentator Paul Sherwen, on Fabian Cancellara’s magnificent pull toward the end: “Let’s hope he has plenty of AAA batteries in his pack for this one!” A puckish reference to the ludicrous controversy over “bike doping” by Cancellara (running a battery-powered motor in his bottom bracket).

Full VeloNews coverage here.

And that 7th Avenue, a short but relatively copacetic bike route downtown, is getting buffered bike lanes.

On the racing scene, our Northwest homeboy, Tyler Farrar, won a Euro stage race, raising expectations even higher for this year’s Tour. With Mark the Mouth Cavendish crashing and getting penalized, Tyler’s chances of a first-ever Tour stage sprint win are looking better all the time.

USA’s one bright star on the downhill scene, pretty much dominated by Brits, Aussies and Kiwis — a Morongo Valley CA lad named Aaron Gwin — won it all at Wililngen in the Milka Wheels of Speed.

It doesn’t happen often, so when it does, we should celebrate: USA! USA!

And Fabian Cancellara won the opening time trial in the Tour of Switzerland, but … they did check his bike for silly little battery motors, did they not?!

So here’s a mountain biker who likes to ride in order to take a break from … professional golfing? We’ve heard of fixie polo, but never seen a knobby show up at tee time.

We have ridden on ice and ridden in the snow, so what can we say to the news that an American mountain biker died in a snowstorm in the Himalayas. Only that at least he went out doing what he loved.

How to respond to the ongoing misery in the Gulf of Mexico? One way would be to reduce driving by one fifth.

Final arguments in the case to end the obstructionist lawsuit that has delayed implementation of the San Francisco Bike Plan for, can you believe it, four years.

BikeRadar is all over the equipment angle on Fabian Cancellara’s win on the brutal cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix 2010 (results here). Cancellara’s Specialized ride seems to have found the sweet spot between rigidity and compliance, using slacker angles, fatter tubing, wider tires and patented elastomer (“chewing gum”) inserts for damping while not overly mushing things up.

Interesting that Specialized is a mountain bike company that crossed over into road rather than the other way around, and it still brings an mtb orientation to the table. Experiments have been done over the years on the optimum setup for cobbled pavement in general, and P-R in particular, showing the detriments of traditional rigid and steep road technology. Yet telescoping suspension with actual travel apparently offers too much efficiency loss.

Undoubtedly bike tech will continue to refine along Specialized’s clever tweaks (putting the elastomers mid-stay was counter-intuitive but pretty smart). But until all the leaders ride the same bike, we’ll inevitably wonder: Was it the rider or the bike?

Although it won’t get noticed much, the real story is Fabian Cancellara’s monster pull at the end of the time trial, with team members struggling just to keep his wheel. It saved him the yellow jersey, deprived Lance of his dream. But Lance will be happy to have the spotlight focused on him even with the near-miss, and the whole thing helps prime interest in this year’s Tour.