One of the two Belgian teams in this year’s Tour de France has announced it’s line up for the 2008 race, and there are five riders from Belgium in it. Christophe Brandt, Mario Aerts, Leif Hoste, Johan Vansummeren and Wim Van Sevenant will join team leaders Cadel Evans and Robbie McEwen, plus Italian rider Dario Cioni and the Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych, on the start line in Brest, France on July 5.

With Evans starting as the number one favourite to win the Tour, the race is especially important to Brandt who is a
good climber and will be of great help to the
Australian in the mountain stages.

“It will be my job to make the pace early on in the mountains. We have two riders in Cioni and Popovych who can ride with Cadel on the later climbs. It’s important for a favourite’s team to control things from the start, otherwise rivals can gain an advantage. I have been working all year in the hope of riding the Tour and will do everything I can to repay the team’s faith in me,” Brandt told us when the selections were announced.

Returning to the Tour is a dream come true for Brandt, who is from Liege in the French -speaking part of Belgium. In 2006 he had a terrible crash in a race in the Antwerp area in which he suffered several fractures, lost a kidney and had to be put into a coma to help his recovery.

“It’s been a long road back. I had done a good Tour of Italy in 2006, plus I’d finished the Tour three times by then. It took me all though 2007 to return, even though I pushed myself. Too hard sometimes. Eventually I had to accept that it would be a long time for me to get back and have patience, and when I did my return started. It was still only in February of this year that I felt my strength had come back,” he says.

Of the other Belgians, Aerts, who is from Herentals in Antwerp province, is a real all-rounder, a hard worker who completed all three big stage races in 2007, the Tours of Italy, France and Spain. Vansummeren, from Lommel in Limburg, is the team’s locomotive who will be there to drag back threatening breakaways and to help Robbie McEwen in the sprints. Leif Hoste and Wim Van Sevenant are both from West Flanders. Hoste, with his Classics pedigree, is a potential stage winner, and Van Sevenant is an out-and-out team worker who will give his all in any terrain.

The team’s reserves include another Belgian, Bart Dockx from Turnhout.