Category: Older stuff

Ok, I guess the verdict is in on Floyd Landis strategy a few days ago of giving the yellow to Pereiro. And that verdict is “Good thinking”.

Today Phonak seemed to be doing everything right. They had one guy in the main break-away, Axel Merckx, and they had two guys near the front of the peleton protecting Landis while Periero’s Caisse d’Epargne-Illes Balears team did a lot of work. Good team strategy for a team I was almost ready to write off as not being strong enough for this task. T-Mobile was essentially playing from the same strategy book, while CSC seemed to be putting major effort into the break-away.

At the base of the last climb, the infamous Alpe D’Huez, the field basically consisted of a 15 strong break-away, and the peleton. There were some interesting names in the break-away group, including Hincapie and Damiano Cunego. As soon as the road tilted up, both groups splintered into little chunks.

A large group of GC men went off the front of the peleton, including Floyd Landis and Andreas Kloden, but NOT including Pereiro. Landis Phonak team-mates immediately attacked to launch Landis, and Kloden’s T-Mobile team-mates counter attacked Kloden. As the attacks came, the group off the front (Groupe Landis) got smaller until the only names of consequence were Landis and Kloden. And then they started picking up people from the original lead group – as they caught up to Merckx, Merckx looked a bit surprised to see Landis up with him, but gave him a bidon (water bottle) and lead Groupe Landis for a few km. But he soon fell off the pace, but then they caught up to a T-Mobile rider Mazzolinni, who did the same for Kloden as Merckx had done for Landis. Various people tried to stay with them as they stormed up the mountain, but ultimately only Garzelli and Lobato could stay with them. Up ahead, the leading group ended up down to just Cunego and Frank Schleck.

Frank Schleck ultimately attacked Cunego and finished a few seconds up on him. Then Garzelli outsprinted Landis for third. The Groupe Malliot Jaune finishes far enough back that Landis is back in yellow, and looking like he has the legs to keep it.

Besides Landis, the great interest today for me was Cunego and Kloden. A few years back, Cunego surprised everybody including his team leader Gilberto Simoni by winning the Giro D’Italia. And Kloden surprised his team leader Ullrich by finishing second overall in the Tour de France behind Armstrong but ahead of Ullrich. Both riders were considered quite young to do so well in major tours, and both of them have done bugger all in the intervening years. It’s great to see that they’ve started to get back that form from before.

In surprising news today, Tom Boonen quit the race early on, citing problems breathing. I think McEwan is pretty assured of the green jersey now.

I think this sets or ties a record for most yellow jersey changes in a race in a long time. Is that just because there isn’t a single dominant rider with a dominant team, or is it because they’re all off their drugs because of Operation Puerto? Either way, this is in many ways more interesting that the last couple of years of Armstrong dominance.

Now that I’m home, I’ve watched the two stages – or at least skimmed them.

Saturday’s was a big weird – the top placed guy in the break-away was 28 and a half minutes behind Landis in GC. Everybody expected Phonax to pick up the pace to keep the break-away within ten minutes or so, but either Phonak didn’t have the legs, or they didn’t care, or they *wanted* to give away the jersey, but they refused to step up. And while Rabobank tried to whip up the peleton, the break-away time gap actually increased towards the end. Instead, the 5 members of the break-away finished 30 minutes up, and this put Oscar Pereiro of Caisse d’Epargne-Illes Balears into the yellow jersey.

If Landis doesn’t get the yellow back, people will mark this stage as the stage when he lost it. If he does, they’ll mark this as a brilliant piece of strategy when you don’t have a team as strong as US Postal of times past.

McEwan and Boonen got good sprint points, and Friere didn’t, so he drops down to third in the green jersey competition.

Sunday’s race had a couple of moderate mountains, and the fatigue is showing. A 6 man break-away got away, but while descending the second last hill, 3 of them crashed hard. Two of the crashers left in an ambulance, out of the race, and Kessler, the guy who won on the Cauberg, managed to get back to the peleton. Kessler soon dropped off the pace, but he managed to finish before the cut-off time and will survive to continue the race. The three surviving members of the break-away attacked each other and one of them fell behind and got swept up into the peleton.

The peleton split apart on the last climb, with the main GC candidates present. Popovych tried to make a lead-out for Discovery, with Hincapie well placed behind him. But that faltered. Then Vandevelde attacked off the front. But the peleton left it too late and they didn’t actually catch the two members of the break-away, so the two finshed, then Vandevelde 3 seconds back, then the 33 members of the peleton 7 seconds back, and then the rest trickled in.

No change in the GC and green jersey competitions today, but some shake-ups in the King of the Mountains points. Last year’s champion Rassmussen moved up to second over-all. Look for him to go on a long break-away on the first big Alps stage on Tuesday to get major mountains points, while the GC contenders watch each other and maybe make an attack on the last climb up L’Alpe D’Huez.

Tomorrow is the rest day, then it’s major mountains stages for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday is flat and long, and Saturday is the time trial that will make or break the tour.

Sorry about the delay here. I write these things up on a mailing list based on “watching” the tour live on live.cyclingnews.com and letour.fr, then I come home and watch the race on TV, and then post a cleaned up version here on my blog. But Friday I left for a friend’s house straight from work, so I never got home to watch the race. I’m just home and getting caught after a weekend with no TV and no internet.

For the Discovery Channel team, it was good news and bad news kind of a day.

First the bad news: After the race yesterday, Paulo Salvodelli, two time winner of the Giro d’Italia and one of the better placed members of the team, was riding down from the finish to the bottom of the mountain where the team buses were, and a spectator lurched in front of him. He crashed into him and hit the pavement hard – he needed 5-10 stiches in his eyebrow. He started today, and then soon abandoned. Noval, the young Discovery team rider who had to be left behind during the team time-trail a few years ago, abandoned not long after.

Now the good news: With the bad results on the mountain yesterday, Discovery’s tactic switched to trying to get into break-aways and win stages. After a few attempts by Hincapie to get into a break, Popovych went into one. He was with Oscar Freire, which could have been a bad combination – since Popovych was 9 minutes down from Landis, Phonak would have been motivated to keep the gap down, and since Freire was near the top of the sprint competition McEwan’s Davitamon-Lotto team would have been motivated to close the gap and get McEwan into a final sprint with him. Also if the break stayed together right to the end, Freire is a better sprinter than Popovych. But everybody was too tired or trying to recover or had other plans, so while Phonak did keep the gap down to 4:25, the sprinters teams didn’t reduce it any further.

Popvych attacked with a few km to go and got free from the other three and took the stage. Friere finished 3rd 29 seconds back, and Boonen and McEwan lead in the peleton.

This moves Popovych into 10th overall, 4:15 back of Landis and maybe makes him a contender again. Landis stays in yellow.

Robbie McEwan is still in the lead of the sprinter’s points, but Friere moves into second ahead of Boonen.

If I can wax poetical for a moment, I’d have to say that today the Pyrenees are littered with the broken dreams of the riders who thought they had a chance to win this year. It was a killer stage – an HC (Hors Categorie) climb, then 4 Categorie 1 climbs, the last summitting 2km from the finish line. A killer, but evidently not the “Queen Stage”, which is what the announcers call the hardest stage of the race – they’re probably reserving that designation for next Wednesday’s stage, which has two HCs and then finishes on a Cat 1.

Mayo was the first to go – he was dragging his way up the first mountain well behind the pack, yelling at the camera motorbike to stop following him, although the motorbike was there because they could tell he was going to abandon. He eventually did in the feed zone between the second and third mountains.

On the first mountain, Leiphiemer, Cunego, Simoni and many others were getting left behind. But those three at least regrouped enough that on the second last mountain, Cunego was actually able to attack off the front for a while, although he cracked badly. But Leipheimer stuck with the group that was about 18 strong on the second last mountain, containing Landis and a bunch of other GC hopefuls. On the final climb, that group went down to 5, including Leiphiemer and Landis, and then Leiphiemer attacked and suddenly it was just him, Floyd Landis, and Denis Menchov. There is a string of little groups trailing behind them, then the “peleton” with AG2R trying to protect their yellow jersey, and some of the former GC hopefuls. But strung out behind them, some more GC hopefuls cracking hard.

Landis lost the sprint to the finish to Menchov and Leipheimer, but his time bonus for third place puts him 8 seconds up on Dessel and into the yellow.

Surprises today:
Euskatel is leaderless with Mayo abandoning. Since the finish is in Spain, near the Basque region, this is a huge disappointment for the fans.

Discovery totally melted down. Azevedo was the only bright spot, only losing 4:10 to Landis. Popovych, one of the candidates to lead the team, was over 6 minutes down. Hincapie and Salvodelli melted down entirely, losing more than 20 minutes each. I hope Hincapie and Salvodelli like carrying bottles because they aren’t going to be leading the team for the rest of this race.

Rabobank and T-Mobile are surprising me with how well they are organizing and delivering their good riders to the front of the race on the mountains. T-Mobile arrived at the tour without their leader and their best “super domestique”, so seeing them with 3 guys in an 18 man lead group is pretty amazing.

AG2R is another surprise – they worked like hell today to keep Dessil in yellow. I wonder if AG2R will work to get Dessil back in yellow for the next couple of days.

Phonak is a surprise and a disappointment. The one rider they had with Landis on the first mountain, Robbie Hunter, is not their best climber, and it was expected that their mountain specialists would stick with Landis but they were nowhere to be seen. Mind you, last year Discovery did the same thing – leaving Armstrong alone whenever he was attacked on the mountains. Maybe you don’t really need help if you’re good enough.

The next three days are “lumpy” stages, which might end in bunch sprints if the sprinter’s teams are not too tired from trying to get over the mountains. Small break-aways might succeed because of that and because of the small hills on the day. Hopefully Phonak won’t tire themselves out trying to defend the yellow jersey. The next important mountain stage is Tuesday which finishes up L’Alpe D’Huez.

Cyclingnews.com says that they purposely didn’t have the mountain stages on the weekends this year because they were getting too crowded with spectators and the organizers were worried that there were going to be more crashes and more spectators interfering with riders.

First mountain stage, and it was worth the wait!

As predicted, the peleton fractured into pieces on the first mountain. There were 20 or so riders back in the “sprinters bus” including one of the GC favourites, Iban Mayo. I guess his dreams of GC are over. Other riders who didn’t seem to have what it takes in the mountains but who’ve managed to get back into the peleton on the long flats include Levi Leipheimer and yellow jersey wearer Sergei Gonchar, and my hero from the Giro a few years back, Cunego.

Gonchar is definitely *not* T-Mobile’s preferred leader – his team was setting tempo on both of the major climbs in spite of the fact that it was causing him to drop off the back of the peleton. If he’d really been the leader, they would have either slacked off or sent somebody back for him. Instead, they had him carrying bottles, and made him take a pull up front for part of the downhill drag into the finish. I guess they’re dedicating themselves to Kloden or Rogers.

Cyril Dessel took yellow by being one of two survivors of a group that got way ahead and stayed ahead – the two man break-away was leading by nine and a half minutes with 5km to go, but they were fighting each other for the stage win and so ended up finishing 7:23 up on the peleton. He’ll also have the polka dot jersey for the “King of the Mountains”. He’s likely to lose both of them in the next two days as other opportunistic breaks go up the mountains.

Freire, Zabel and Bennati are in the peleton while McEwan and Boonen were in the sprinters bus, so yesterday’s stage winner and those others will gain some ground in the green jersey competition, but not enough to wear it yet.

Tomorrow is another mountainous stage, but this time it finishes up a long climb. The announcers don’t seem to agree with me, but I would expect the GC contenders to have a go at getting some time on each other tomorrow, since it finishes with a long climb. An attack on the mountain, but with no downhill to recover and regroup, would be a great opportunity to stir things up. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are not so much flat as “lumpy”, but nothing great is going to happen to the GC on those days. Monday is another rest day, and then Tuesday is a mountain stage that finishes on the famous Alpe D’Huez.