Today's stage: 13.6 km Team Time Trial to kick off the final Grand Tour of the season in Spain.
Who won today's stage? The Leopard-Trek team led by World Time Trial Champion Fabian Cancellara took the stage putting Jakob Fuglsang into the leader's red jersey.
What matters in the GC race? Defending champion Vincenzo Nibali (Liquigas-Cannondale) and his team finished second on the stage. Among the GC favorites, Nibali is easily in the best shape. Many others like Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky) and Denis Menchov (Geox-TMC) are 30 seconds or more back.
What matters in the other competitions? Nothing. The pecking orders will be defined over the first few days leading to the stage 4 summit finish at Sierra Nevada.
Biggest surprise: Astana and Movistar, with little renown finished 4th and 5th on the stage. A nice result for both after difficult seasons for both.
Biggest disappointment: Garmin-Cervelo proports to really value this discipline. That showed last month in France at the Tour when they won the TTT, but not here with a disappointing 9th place finish.
Other items of note: There were a couple of crashes and a whole host of mechanicals. Radio Shack likely lost a high finish when co-leader Jani Brajkovic had a mechanical right off the start ramp and had to wait... Many riders are here looking for redemption after crashing out of the Tour de France. Those include the aformentioned Brajkovic, Andreas Kloden (Radio Shack), Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky) and Jurgen Van Den roeck (Omega-Pharma Lotto)... Those redemption riders plus the main Giro d'Italia contenders (except Contador) will be the ones contesting the overall victory here... Many of the top Tour de France riders are in Colorado for next week's USA Pro Cycling Challenge which will also be covered here.
What is coming tomorrow? Sprint stage. Considering that it's Spain, its fairly flat though staying near the beach allows for that. The usual suspects for sprints are all here: Mark Cavendish (HTC-High Road), Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Cervelo), Alessandro Petacchi (Lampre-ISD), and Tom Boonen (QuickStep) are all in Spain to contest the sprints.
Follow the race each morning on my twitter: twitter.com/WingnutMiller
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