Cadel Evans has moved into the second tier of all-time greats in cycling – No he's not Armstrong, Merckx, Hinault, Coppi, or anyone of that magintude, but Evans is now just one step below. Adding a Tour de France win to his World Championship in the road race from a couple of years put him in elite company (the names mentioned above plus LeMond) to win both a Tour de France and a World Championship. In addition, Evans has two Tour seconds, has held the pink jersey in the Giro d'Italia multiple times, won major classics like Fleche Wallone, dominating single week stage races such as winning this year's Tour de Romandie while not in great form and won the UCI World Tour in 2007. The list of accomplishments is long and adding the Tour to it moves Evans to a whole other level. Even if he nevers wins another race again, Cuddles, as he is known will go down as one of the best of this generation and an all-time great.
Andy Schleck needs to learn to win – Over the last few seasons, with the exception of Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Andy Schleck races only to get in shape for the Tour de France. He does not go all out to win. This has resulted in him not being able to close the deal. For all of their faults, Evans and Alberto Contador enter every race with the intention of either winning a stage or winning the GC battle. In one-day races they attempt to win, always. That is not Schleck. He just doesn't ride all out outside of one week in Belgium during classics season and three weeks in France. To win the Tour, he needs to win some other races. When he shows up at the Tour of California next May, he should race to win instead of using the miles as competition training and not worrying about his fifth place result. He should go all out in either Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico next March. He should go for the win in either the Criterium du Dauphine or the Tour de Suisse next May. All of this is still just training, but its training of the mind for victory, not training of the legs which have been fine and good enough to win if the mental aspect is in place.
Just because Alberto Contador failed to do it doesn't mean the Giro-Tour double can no longer be accomplished – Contador dominated the Giro and then finished fifth in the Tour. The double hasn't been done since Marco Pantani did it in 1998. Despite this, it is still possible, but only in the right year. The Giro and the Tour were both historically difficult climbing courses for their respective tours. Get a year when one or the other is slightly easier on the legs (more likely the Tour as the Giro is pretty much always a punishing test) and it is still doable. Get a year like this one and forget about it.
French cycling has hope on the GC, finally – Not since the Festina affair leveled the best French cycling team in 1998 has a Frenchmen even contended for any honors on GC at the Tour. With Thomas Voeckler's fourth place finish and week in yellow, his focus needs to change as he will no longer be allowed into long breakaways after this performance. At the same time, Pierre Rolland emerged as the next great French hope as a climber. His win atop Alpe d'Huez was the first for a Frenchman since 1986 and at age 24, he has a great future in front of him. Realistically, he could have finished in the top 10 and possibly even the top 5, but until the Alpe d'Huez stage he was working as Voeckler's domestique, defending the yellow jersey despite looking stronger than Voeckler in the climbs up Luz-Ardiden and the Galibier. Beyond the Europcar guys, three other Frenchmen finished in the top 15 on the GC.
Doping appears to be on th downswing – Is there still doping? No question. At the same time, anyone watching could tell things had changed. Despite improving bike technology, most of the climbs this year were ridden anywhere from 3-5 minutes slower than in recent races they were included and the riders looked totally dead and spent upon crossing the finish line. What little doping remains among the GC right now is negligible at best. That makes for a closer race (as opposed to the superhuman Armstrong times and races) and better racing. It also will lead to a change in tactics as massive time gaps will no longer be gained on single climbs like in the past. It will take longer range attacks like Schleck and Contador's incredible attacks on the last two mountain stages to do real damage and blow races up like they used to get blown up.
Cycling needs a uniform standard for its doctors – Cycling doctors generally do an incredible job and they get to crash victims quickly barring crazy circumstances like Alexandre Vinokourov's drop into a tree in a ditch beside the road. That said, the doctors should all be in unison when allowing riders to continue. Chris Horner should never have been allowed back on his bike after his crash (especially in hindsight considering he doesn't remember riding in that day at all). Tom Boonen likely should have not been allowed back on his after his nasty crash either. These are things that put riders in danger. Thankfully, none of the riders who should not have been allowed to race on were involved in any serious crashes later on, but it only takes one for a major tragedy to occur. This should be doubly emphasized in a year in which a rider died in a crash at the Giro d'Italia and the Tour passed by the Fabio Castartelli memorial in the Pyrenees.
Mark Cavendish might not be the fastest sprinter, but he has the best team – Yes, Cavendish is among the most talented and fastest sprinters in the peloton. At the same time, he benefits from having the best lead out team ever seen in cycling to launch him to the finish line. I think Andre Greipel and Tyler Farrar would win just as much with the Cavendish lead out train and Cavendish would win on the same level as his rivals without. Considering the rumors floating around Cavendish that he is moving to Team Sky next season, we might get to see him try without his prodigious team to lead him to the promised land.
Team Radioshack finally got what their comeuppance in this race – Lance Armstrongs former team has been quite unpopular among cycling fans. Part of that is the doping cases and part is the arrogance shown by team director Johan Bruyneel. This year, The Shack had a nightmare of a tour. They entered with four co-leaders riding for GC with the team leadership to be determined on the road. This has worked before, when this was the Discovery Channel team and Contador overcame teammate Levi Leipheimer and won the tour over his teammate and Evans. Here, it all went wrong. By the end of stage five, Jani Brajkovic and Chris Horner were out with crashes among the leaders and Leipheimer had lost over four minutes. Then Kloden was aught in the stage 9 crash that took out Vinokourov, Jurgen Van den Broeck and David Zabriskie and Radioshack's tour was over. This is not a team set up to go stage hunting and they employ no sprinters at the Tour de France.
What a breakthrough for Garmin-Cervelo – Despite being one of the better overall teams on paper, Garmin-Cervelo had never managed to do anything of note in the Tour. No stage wins and only a few years of surprising one year wonder GC contenders (Christian Vande Velde 4th in 2008, Bradley Wiggins 4th in 2009, Ryder Hesjedal 8th in 2010). This year, it all changed. Garmin won the team time trial and put World Champion Thor Hushovd in the yellow jersey. Then Tyler Farrar got his long awaited stage win. The team then admirably defended Hushovd's yellow jersey, only really losing it because of the break that stayed away putting Voeckler into the race lead on stage 9 (a break that would have been reeled in if not for the big crash that took out Vinokourov and the rest). After that, Hushovd poached two more stages for the team from breakaways, one of them being a well designed team tactic when Hushovd and Hesjedal got clear together along with Edvald Boasson Hagen. The two Garmin men teamed up perfectly to get the stage win on stage 16 (Boasson Hagen would get his own stage win, his second of the Tour, the next day). Then, with all of those stage wins in the bag, Hesjedal, Vande Velde and Tom Danielson rode a great stage to Alpe d'Duez to clinch the team classification as well. Add in Danielson's surprise top 10 and Garmin could not have hoped for a better tour.
The team tactics as a whole were bad by nearly everyone here – The Schlecks ordered their team to the front to blow the field up constantly. All it did was blow their own riders out the back of the peloton for the most part. Contador never had any of his guys up the road in breakaways despite the need for domestiques later on in stages. The Schlecks with Leopard-Trek and Evans with BMC almost always had somebody when needed until the final climbs as did Thomas Voeckler and his Europcar team. Liquigas, riding for Ivan Basso never did anything and the other favorites sat and watched Evans pull them back to the field instead of working together to reel in long attacks. As a whole, with the exception of the Schleck attack on the Galibier stage and Evans working to reel in attacks, this race was ridden as though the peloton was still doped up. As we saw, the limits have changed and therefore the tactics need to change back to what they were in previous eras.
The tour needs more time-trialing – In prior times, there uses to be two time-trials. In addition, some years included a prologue. Heck, one of Armstrongs wins had two time-trials, a prologue time-trial, a team time-trial and a mountain time-trial to Alpe d'Huez. I'm not calling for anything insane like that or the 65-70 km time-trials that were run when Miguel Indurain was winning his Tours in the early 1990s. Now, all we have is a short team time-trial designed to not have huge time gaps and one individual test against the clock at the end. Please Tour organizers, give us something else. If you insist on the race being a pure climbing race, give us a mountain time trial then.
No comments:
Post a Comment