The rain came and Thor the mighty God of Thunder claimed stage 6.
The rain in spain fell mainly on the plain etc etc....
The obligatory breakaway came after about 50km and contained three very strong riders in David Millar, Sylvain Chavanel and Stephan Auge, some time later they were joined by Spainard Amets Txurruka who managed to bridge the gap between the leaders and the peleton. They got out to a 3 minute lead which had Millar as the 'virtual' leader on course after starting the day just over a minute behind Cancellara.
Some 30km from Barcelona and back in the peloton, a crash exiting a roundabout saw Hushovds Cervélo team mate Heinrich Haussler , Michael Rogers (Columbia-HTC) and Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Slipstream) go down; with a limping Rogers very slow to return to his machine. He lost 13 minutes in the overall classification andhis tour is all but done. Of course we had money on Haussler.
However the peleton easily reeled the breakaway in and the big names got to the front for the final short sharp climbing sprint home in Barcelona. Emerging from the chasing pack Hushovd was too strong and recorded his 7th Tour stage victory and placed himself just 1 point behind Cavendish in the race for the green jersey - Its On! Our tip Oscar Friere was 2nd and almost all of the big names were in the group that crossed the line together.
There were some shuffles at the top end, aside from Mick Rogers dropping out of contention and only a Flloyd Landis like stage win would see him back (omg! did i just say that?) Menchov lost more time (gone!) Astana's Haimar Zubeldia, Garmin-Slipstream's Dave Zabriskie and his teammate David Millar - the stage protagonist who almost lasted but was caught just one kilometre from the line - lost their positions on the leader board's top-10, elevating Christian Vande Velde (Garmin-Slipstream), Gustav Larsson (Saxo Bank) and Maxime Monfort (Columbia-HTC) to eighth, ninth and tenth overall.
Stage 7 - mountain finish - the race begins for real!
No comments:
Post a Comment