Trek Factory Racing announce their Tour de France lineup in an innovative way

Twitter seems to be the default way to announce anything these days - the birth of a royal baby, a footballer signing a new contract or even a Tour de France squad.

The standard procedure for announcing a squad for a race in recent years has been for the team to post a list of riders and a picture of all of them smiling at the camera.

But Trek Factory Racing like to do things a bit differently and in their spirit of getting their fans involved in the action, the team chose a different one of their followers to announce each rider.

Accidental Sunshine (probably not their real name) of Adelaide got the honour of announcing former Luxembourg national champion Laurent Didier in the squad.

While Szilvia Jando (probably their real name), who lists her hobbies as cycling, snooker, crocheting, knitting and photography, saw her dreams fulfilled by announcing that Haimar Zubeldia would be riding as well.

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And so it continued, each rider being named one after another by cycling fans from around the world. Hopefully the guys at Trek weren't caught off guard by a rogue announcement - Dave from Basildon announcing an unknown 21-year-old from Belgium, for example.

Everyone stayed on message and a pretty strong squad was announced.

Cycling Weekly will be announcing their Tour de France reporting lineup in a similar fashion in due course.

Trek Factory Racing squad for the Tour de France

Fabian Cancellara, Marko Irizar, Bob Jungels, Laurent Didier, Stijn Devolder, Haimar Zubeldia, Gregory Rast, Bauke Mollema, Julian Arredondo

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