Lance Armstrong has received \u00e2\u20ac\u0153high interest\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from sponsors willing to back his cycling team if he takes over control of financially strapped Astana.<\/p>\n
Astana receives most of its financial support from Kazakh state holding company Samruk-Kazyna, but the Central Asian nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s economy has been badly hit by the global financial crisis. The team has not paid its employees lately.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Considering the economy and considering global sports sponsorships \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tough climate for all that stuff. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had high interest,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Armstrong told The Associated Press on Thursday as he prepared for the start of his first Giro d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Italia\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhich he says has no illusions about winning…\u00c2\u00a0 Details<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lance Armstrong has received \u00e2\u20ac\u0153high interest\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from sponsors willing to back his cycling team if he takes over control of financially strapped Astana. Astana receives most of its financial support from Kazakh state holding company Samruk-Kazyna, but the Central Asian nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s economy has been badly hit by the global financial crisis. The team has not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-road-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11710,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions\/11710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}