So you want to sponsor a cycling team?

Mid afternoon ramblings...I am leaving with my housemate, Dan(a brit from manchester) for the kermessee in Rauw. Rauw is in Mol which is home of Mr. Tom Boonen. Its about 35k ride from here. Race starts at 1830 and is 115k.

So i had a discussion with the house owners last night about moving into another house. Didn't go too well. I am going to talk to people after the race tonight and try to find something new. Still waiting to hear back from the Irish cycling house which is near Ghent. Ghent is in west belgium and has a ton more races. My updates to this blog are a little sporadic in posting b/c I have to sit outside a church on the stoop and log into some wireless network that isn't password protected. Not ideal b/c its been cold the last few days here. Its also a bit sketchy. So I just keep my head down and don't look up at people when they go by but its not a long term solution. We already had one free wifi owner crack down on us and locked his network up.

Bike racing here is a different level both on and off the bike. There a lot of professional teams here b/c of the tax benefits. I say tax benefits loosely b/c its more of a tax scam. Here is how it works. You are Company XYZ, you have 200k euros in revenue for your business but don't want to pay taxes on it. You contact a local cycling manager and offer to sponsor the team for 200k euro. This gives company XYZ a tax deduction of 200k euro. Bike team gives a receipt for 200k euro to the company and the company sends it to the tax man. After this, the bike team returns 100k euro to the company. Do you see what happened? yeah, its white collar crime in a blue collar sport(or used to be blue). If tax man questions bike team, then manager claims they bought bikes etc. Since everything here in Belgium is CASH ONLY there is no way to argue against(more on this later). So you, Company XYZ, sponsor a cycling team and have 100k euro of untaxable money. Pure genius ehhh?

chow chow
matthew