Luca Paolini (Quick Step) won’t start Saturday’s Giro di Lombardia while ProTour leader Danilo Di Luca (Liquigas-Bianchi) is in doubt for Saturday’s season closer.

Paolini injured his hand in a collision with a T-Mobile team car in Sunday’s Paris-Tours and has pulled the plug on his racing season. Quick Step, meanwhile, will enter Lombardia looking to win the season’s last big race with a determined Paolo Bettini.

Di Luca, meanwhile, promises to start despite a knee injury that prompted his early departure from Paris-Tours after 200km of racing. L’Equipe reported that Di Luca was scheduled to meet with a physiotherapist Monday to determine the extent of any injury.

Di Luca, 29, already has the ProTour individual title sewn up, but wants to race in front of his home fans in the season finale.

“Whatever happens I’ll take the start, but in this state that might be the best I can hope for,” Di Luca told L’Equipe. “This week the pain was bearable, because we weren't forcing things very much in training, but today I was stuck and in these conditions it was useless to continue.”

CSC seals team trophy
Team CSC put a lock on the ProTour team trophy after putting four riders into the top 20 in Sunday’s Paris-Tours. The team widened its lead to Dutch rival Rabobank to 31 points, meaning no matter what happens in Saturday’s Giro di Lombardia, Team CSC will take the team title.

“We have spread ourselves over a variety of races and this has proven a success. To be the best team has been one of our goals for a long time now, even though the new points system took some getting used to,” said Team CSC manager Bjarne Riis. “Regardless of how you look at it though, we are this season's most successful team.”

Team CSC scored stage victories in all three big tours, podiums at the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, and overall victories at the Benelux Tour and Paris-Nice.

Six more years for Ferretti
Giancarlo Ferretti, the legendary Italian director called the “Man of Iron,” can sleep comfortably at night after securing a six-year deal with Sony-Ericsson to take over lead sponsorship for his team.

The news comes just as Fassa Bortolo was ending its long-running sponsorship, but it came too late for Ferretti to keep star sprinter Alessandro Petacchi. In the uncertainty of the team’s future, Petacchi penned a deal to co-lead with Erik Zabel the newly formed Milram team.

Ferretti has already signed the Australian tandem of Stuart O’Grady and Matt White while Giro d’Italia star Gilberto Simoni is reportedly close to signing on.

Milram will take over the ProTour license of Domina Vacanze, which more or less will remain intact. Ferretti, however, will have to wait to see if he can retain his ProTour slot because Fassa Bortolo was only issued a one-year ProTour license due to the uncertainty of the team’s future.

Other teams hoping to earn ProTour status include Comunidad Valenciana, Agritubel, Mr. Bookmaker.com and Ag2r, which has signed big stars Francisco Mancebo and Christophe Moreau.

Zabel’s win a ‘dream come true’
Erik Zabel couldn’t be happier with his victory in Sunday’s Paris-Tours. The veteran German sprinter ace hadn’t won a major race since winning the same race in 2003 and a victory was long overdue.

“I was all calm, since I already won two times in Tours and placed third another two times. So I knew how to perform the sprint,” Zabel said on T-Mobile’s web page. “The fact that it really worked out, was terrific. It’s a dream come true.”

In 2004, Zabel won six races (two stages in the Peace Race, two in Bayern-Rundfahrt; Rund um Köln and a stage in Ruta del Sol), but scored 28 second and third places. This year was much of the same, with one win (at the Rund um den Henninger Turm) and a long string of second- and third-places heading into the fall classic.

Zabel’s third Paris-Tour title gives him even more as he heads into the 2006 season with a switch to the Milram team after racing with T-Mobile his entire career since 1993.

“First of all, I think it’s remarkable that there will be a third German ProTour team,” he said. “What’s most important is the team’s success. Given the long season with its many ProTour races, I believe there’s enough space for Petacchi and me in one team.”

Ekimov correction
One of our readers pointed out an error in our report Monday about the venerable Viatcheslav Ekimov. The 39-year-old Russian hasn’t finished 12 Tours (as the official Tour de France history book states) but indeed 14, according to his official palmares.

He’s started and completed every Tour since 1990, except in 1999 when he raced with the small Italian team Amica Chips (he finished both the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España that year). Only Lucian Van Impe, with 15 Tours completed with no abandons, and Joop Zoetemelk, with 16 Tours completed with no abandons, can boast a better record.

Ekimov missed the 2005 Tour with a neck injury.