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

Friday, July 11, 2008

OK...so after my little rant, let's get back to talking about the Tour.

The race has hit the middle mountain stages in France's Massif Central region. Yesterday was a summit finish and had I been making predictions I would have selected Ricco (no, really, I would have) as the finished really, really suited his riding style. Today is a very different stage even though the number of climbs and amount of climbing is about the same. The climbs come earlier and there's no really chance for the GC guys to put time into their rivals without expending way too much energy. The climbs are hard enough to crack the sprinters (or at least most of them) so I don't see them playing too much of a role. So that leaves the rolleurs to fight out a win. Jens Voigt is the typical rider of this sort and he's been talking like he wants to go off on a big break. George Hincapie would be another good choice here except that his team has the yellow jersey so he'll be protecting that. The Garmin-Chipotle team has been pretty aggressive in the race to date, though they don't have a big result to show for it. That means that Millar might try something. The trouble is that he's still close enough to Kirchen's GC time to really be allowed to get away. Really a hard race to predict today but I foresee a group of 30-40 coming to the line together and the best sprinter of the group getting the win. That could be Hincapie if he's allowed to ride. Another person might be Fillippo Pelazatto. Finally, Valverde might be a good enough sprinter to take this out.

The one thing I would say is that yesterday showed that if the main contenders can't do something really quick to put Cadel Evans in some real difficulty the Tour is already over. Evans was right with the three best finishers yesterday and he put another small amount of time into Menchov and Sastre. Cunego cracked a bit and Dessel was nowhere to be seen (so much for my dark horse). None of these guys are going to ride the final time trial at a pace that'll rival Evans so they have to get time on the mountains and they aren't really showing that they can do that early on here. Evans' biggest rival might turn out to be present yellow jersey wearer Kim Kirchen who put in a great time trial and who held his own on the climbs yesterday (even though he lost a bit of time). The next big stages are going to take place Sunday and Monday and we'll have a much better feel then as to how this race will shake out.

Thanks for reading.

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