Cyclists on Twitter miss their chance to speak

THERE was a time when the only place to read about the Giro d'Italia was on the pinky pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport - whose publishers also own the race.

TWITTER FAN: Lance Armstrong posts his latest tweet, while fellow Twitterer and team manager Johan Bruyneel looks on (Getty Images)

However, now if you really want to get the inside track on the thoughts of the peleton, you only need to visit Twitter because no sportsmen have embraced the most trendy word in social media more than cyclists.

Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Carlos Sastre, George Hincapie, Michael Rogers, David Zabriskie, Ivan Basso and several people claiming to be Floyd Landis (the real one can be found here) all tweet.

For the cycling fan there is some interesting insight among the inane entries about restaurants visited, school runs completed, movies viewed and races won and lost.

Armstrong is the most prolific twitterer and with just shy of 800,000 followers is by far the most popular.

His tweets are also powerful. When he recently started extolling the virtue of his new favourite brand of coffee - sales of the brand soared.

When he talks music, downloads increase.

When his bike was stolen during the Tour of California earlier this year, he credited Twitter with its safe return.

However, when Davide Rebellin, the silver medallist in last year's Olympic road race and Stephan Schumacher were both revealed to have tested positive in retests of Beijing drug samples - total silence.

Armstrong instead was twittering about his son's maths test. A missed chance, yes but surprising, certainly not.

For further insight, read Procycling's fascinating interview with Filipo Simeoni in the May issue available now.

UPDATED: Mark Cavendish has forced Twitter to close the account www.twitter.com/markcavendish after the tweets - which included some incendiary comments about Tom Boonen - were proved to be fake.

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