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

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Well, I was wrong about the winner of stage 2 of the Tour as Norwegian Thor Husshovd won his first stage of this year's Tour and his sixth stage in the eight years he's been coming to the event. What is interesting is that my reasoning was good in that I thought that the dynamics of yesterday's race would repeat themselves to some degree. Cancellara took a big flyer that might have succeeded had there been a bit less wind and the stronger sprinters did do better than the pure sprinters as both Zabel and Freire were both near the front at the end. The surprising thing to me was that Kim Kirchen was once again in the top five of the stage. It makes me wonder if he's planning to try and win the Green Jersey that he took over today. He's good enough to do well on the medium mountain stages that'll come up a little later in the week. I'll be the first time that someone who wasn't a sprinter has won the Maillot Vert since Laurent Jalabert did back in the late nineties. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

For tomorrow we have a much more typical sprinter's stage with a flat finish and no climbs along the route. That means that the pure sprinters will come forward to contest things along with the power sprinters. This is the stage for the likes of Mark Cavendish and Robbie McEwen and, if things work out well for him, my boy Oscar Freire. For my money, the interesting clash here will be between the big egos of McEwen and Cavendish. For sporting reasons I want to see a clean finish between these two but there's a part of me that'd like to see these guys throw a few elbows in the sprint just to read the copy that'll get generated. In terms of real analysis, Cavendish has the better lead out train with American George Hincapie and German rider Gerald Ciolek there to deliver him to the line but McEwen has shown time and time again that he doesn't really need a train as he can get on others' wheels to get him close to the finish line. McEwen won a bunch of stages at the Tour of Switzerland so he's definitely ready to go but Cavendish is rumored to be leaving the race when it hits the mountains so he's motivated to get his wins now. I see Cavendish winning this but if he and McEwen spend too much time looking at each other I see Freire stealing this win.

On a personal note, today was my first day back from my week-long break. I did fifty miles for mostly flat terrain with a few hard efforts to see how the legs felt. I was good for the first 90 minutes and then things sort of fell off after that which was to be expected. The nice thing is that I've had good energy for the rest of the day and I've gotten a lot done around the house. Tomorrow will be a combination of time on the TT bike and then some recovery on the road bike. My goal is to do 50-60 miles per day for the next two weeks before I head out to Salt Lake City for some family time and a recovery week. I think this'll deliver me in the best condition to the Elberton Georgia Cup weekend in early August.

Got to get to bed so I'll sign off now but we'll see who has the legs tomorrow.

Thanks for Reading.

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