Let Levi Cry

In 2008, the Amaury Sport Oganisation announced that the Astana team wouldn’t be competing in any of its races that year. This was in part due to Astana’s multiple doping infractions, and even more to do with ASO demonstrating its autonomy to run its own races, in defiance of the UCI.

The Astana team of 2008 wasn’t exactly the same as the Astana team of 2007. Johan Bruyneel had moved over, bringing with him his US Postal/Discovery staff and riders. That wasn’t a fact that would do much to endear the team to race organizers or fans.

And although the previous year’s Tour winner, Alberto Contador, was the team leader, Levi Leipheimer was the US-centric focus of Astana’s exclusion. He launched a Let Levi Ride campaign, complete with its own website and shareable banners, to create a loud well of US fans demanding the team be allowed to ride. And presumably to demonstrate the amount of US viewers the ASO would lose if the exclusion held. European fans rightly mocked the entire thing.

We bought the LetLeviCry.com domain immediately, quickly downloaded and modified Levi’s website, and then hosted it on Derailed’s servers. It was made by the Derailed team after work on the night of Levi’s site launch, and once it was live we switched off the computer and did something more interesting.

I was woken the next morning by a call from Derailed’s hosting provider, complaining that we’d burned through more than an entire month’s traffic overnight. We’d accidentally gone viral with something that included the word “bum’ole.”

On reflection, we should’ve changed “Levi” to “Vile” instead of “Evil” in the header. Actually, on reflection, we shouldn’t have made it at all. Too many emails from Danish teenagers and upset Yanks. Still, it was fun seeing our banners in people’s forum signatures for a while.

Here’s the site, then the banners we made.