Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Saturday, July 08, 2006

So, you shouldn't really trust my predictions too much on the Tour. Sure I had some of the names but, wow, was I wrong about a lot of it. Not a great day for American cycling in the Tour and a pretty bad day for the Discovery Team. George and Salvodelli both lost over 2 minutes on Honchar and while he won't be a real big factor in the high mountians, the loss of over a minute to Landis, Evans and Kloden can't be overestimated.

Julich crashed out as well so Sastre is definitely the team leader. Even Zabriskie did badly (for him). The biggest disappointment has got to be Leipheimer who saw his chances of stepping up on the podium and even finishing in the top five disappear today. The questionis whether it's a bad day or if he's cooked for the Tour by going too hard in the Dauphine. We'll see in a couple of days on stage ten. If he can come back, maybe he'll try to shoot for the KOM jersey or maybe a stage win since he'll be allowed to go in a break at this point. Both the team leaders for Gerolsteiner did poorly with the youngsters Lang and Fothen now seeming like the team leaders.

Honchar was on form for sure and Rogers looked good too and both should do excellent work for T-Mobile's leader Andreas Kloden. Won't it be ironic if T-Mobile finally wins again and does it without Ullrich. If you take out the TT specialists and youngsters (who aren't likely to hold up over an entire three week effort and will have a really bad day or two in the mountians), here's what the overall looks like:

Landis
Kloden 50"
Karpets 52"
Evans 52"
Menchov 1'00"
Moreau 1'07"
Salvodelli 1'10"
Lang 1'22"
Sastre 1'27"
Hincapie 1'30"

Floyd is likley to be frustrated by his two flats on the ride which may have cost him between 30 and 45 seconds but I don't think he would have beat Honchar in today's stage. The interesting thing is while there was no Lance-like beating of the big contenders, Floyd did open up a gap on the rest of the pack; all of whom are within 40 seconds of each other. Kloden's got the best team but is he back to his 2004 form ? Even if he's not, T-Mobile's got a lot of cards to play. It looks like they did bring the best team to support Ullrich. The down side is that they've only got seven guys and a lot of those were selected to ride a strong tempo. Other than Guerini, I don't see many of them being able to stay with Kloden over the Soudet on Wednesday. If I'm Bruyneel, I use my line up of better climbers to push the pace there and see if I can isolate Kloden, Menchov and Sastre.

Tomorrow's back to the sprinters but none of them are fighting for yellow. Maybe the Quick-Step team will be able to set Boonen up a little better now that they don't have to protect the jersey. Of course, now that the overall's a bit more settled there may be a break of guys way down on the overall allowed to get up the road. McEwen's team would definitely like that though Credit Agricole and Lampre would have a real interest in bringing it back together for their sprinters Hushovd and Bennati. Voigt took it really easy today as did Rabobank's Weening and Disco's Noval. there's a Cat 3 climb 75 km into the stage so Pineau and/or Wegmann might try to get into the break as well. The thing about breaks though is that it's a crap shoot in a way. If you jump with the wrong guys, your break attempt gets pulled back. If you jump too often, you cook your legs or are on the limit and can't get go when the right break goes (I have some personal experience with this).

On the other hand, the way this Tour is going, any one of the favorites could crash and be out tomorrow or just end up behind a split between 5 and 10 km to go and lose a minute. This is the Tour. The other thing we may see that hasn't been seen in years is riders gaining and losing lots of time on various stages. That used to be how things went in the days before in-ear radios and in-car TVs and on-bike GPS chips. A lot of commentators have been disparaging about these trends because they say that it takes all of the tactics out of the race. That may be true to a degree but it's been a long time that we've had a race as wide open as this one and we may see it become a lot more dependent on the ups and downs of the riders. That having been said, T-Mobile is in a really good place right now.

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