What a tour.
The highlights for me:
Alberto Contador.
The win of Alberto Contador in the 2009 Tour de France was the triumph of a man that is set to dominate this great race for years to come. Yes he was on the strongest team, but he won this race in the face of adversity from within that team. Also consider that he won one individual time trial and was second in the other. He won a mountain top finish and on the two others did not lose any time to his opponents. This is a very important factor and it is the reason that he has won the last 4 grand tours he has ridden in. He has only ridden 5 - the 2005 Tour de France (as a 22 year old) was the only one he did not win. He one of only 5 men to have won all 3 grand tours and is the youngest rider to do so, completing the hat trick at 25 years of age.
He was won
2007/09 Tour de France
2008 Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy)
2008 Vuelta a Espana (Tour of Spain)
The Tour de France has a history of domination. When you look at the list of
winners you see the pattern, domination by a rider, a few year gap then another rider dominates, then gap etc etc. Armstrong won 7, before him there were 3 different winners, before that Indurain won 5 in a row, before that Lemond, then Hinault, then Merckx, the Anquetil.
The common thread among these dominant winners?
They all won multiple Time Trials stages and also could win mountain stages.
You have to be able to win against the clock and you have to be able to climb.
Who in the current group of riders that would be contesting the Yellow Jersey can compete with Contador in a time trial?
Wiggins? Armstrong? Evans? maybe, but not on 2009 form.
He showed this year that he has become a TT force.
Who can climb with him?
Andy Schleck.
Contador attacked on stage 7 to Arcalis - the first summit finish. Make no mistake he could have won that stage and put himself in yellow but with queries on Astana leadership and 2 weeks of riding to follow meant that he did enough to jump into second and leave himself 6 seconds adrift of Italian Rinaldo Nocentini (who??) He then attacked on the second summit finish to Verbier and won the stage, taking yellow and destroying the hopes of, well, everyone really. At the final summit finish on Mount Ventoux he rode defensively and just marked Andy Schleck, he never ever looked under pressure. To me he could have won this race by a long way if he chose to grind his opponents (and team mates) into the ground.
In short there is no one in the current group that can beat Contador in a Grand Tour.
Not without significant improvement in the TT from Andy Schleck or the youngsters Vincenzo Nibaldi, Roman Kreuziger, Bryce Feilu or Tony Martin taking a big step up.
But there is always the team aspect. He rode in the strongest team in history this year. I'm going to be bold and say that it would not have made a difference to the outcome if he rode for another team. Sure he would not have got an advantage like he did in the team TT, but still he would have made up for it in the hills. Next year he will not have a team as strong (there are various rumours about his likely destination) and he is not a team player as we saw - that is my only knock for him. You can bet that next year everyone will be super keen to knock him off so it is going to be very very interesting.
Mark Cavendish.
Unbelievable.
6 stage wins this year. 10 over the past 2 Tours. I think i ranted enough
here.He is that much superior to the rest of the sprinters, that given flat finish only bad luck or poor tactics are going to beat him. When you have a team like Columbia-HTC working for him and Mark Renshaw delivering him to the perfect spot every time, the poor tactics factor rarely comes into play and as for luck, you generally make your own in cycling and his team makes sure that rarely enters the equation either.
A big mention to team Columbia-HTC. They were awesome. Astana was powerful but Columbia repeatedly showed the peleton on each and every flat stage who was boss. They got on the front for long stretches to chase down breaks and then still had enough left to get their man to the front. Cavs win on stage 19 after Columbia chased down a break and then stuck together over a cat 2 climb only 20km from the finish was an amazing team effort. The best sprint train i have ever seen, watching them over the last kilometer of a flat stage was astonishing.
The Green jersey issue is the only sour note here. Sure Hushovd won it with intermediate sprints and a stage win on a non sprinters stage, he was consistent and brilliant and that is what wins you the jersey. But if he had not have protested against cavendish on stage 14 and gained 13 points on him, Cave would have won the green jersey. 6 stage wins vs 1 stage win. Cavendish beat Hushovd every single time they went head to head.
We know who the best sprinter at the tour was!
Front on views do not do justice to his speed, they never show hom much he wins by - always wait for the overhead. Only once did anyone get within a bike length of Cavendish. Amazing.
Erik Zabel said he rated Cav in the top 3 sprinters of all time - and that was before this tour.
He might just stand alone now.
The race itself.
What a grand plan, the penultimate stage finishing on top of Mount Ventoux, the hardest hill in France. For race director Christian Prudhomme, the dream was for the bald mountain to be the deciding moment of the 2009 Tour. Unfortunately Contador conspired against him but the dream went very close to happening. Ventoux is always a spectacle, but this year it was special, there were over 500,000 fans on the mountain. If the race was up for grabs, imagine the crowd then - it has the scope to be the ultimate way to decide the race. The scenery is always breathtaking, the coverage just gets better. I am sure Christian Prudhomme will continue to tweak this race and make it better as he has done each year. Removing time bonuses, returning team time trials (although the jury is out there) less ITT, more summit finishes and i think we will see a penultimate summit finish rather than an ITT again in the near future.
Lance Armstrong.
A freak.
You are the youngest ever world champ, you get cancer, you come back and win 7 consecutive Tours. Retire, get bored and then at 37 decide you are getting back on the bike to try and win again (under the guise of raising cancer awareness of course!) . Why? Because you are Lance.
What an amazing story that keeps getting better. Lance is good for sport, good for cycling, good for everything. That he almost got the Yellow jersey in stage 4 (missed by 0.022 seconds) is testament to the man and his self belief. I did not think he could win. I thought he could finish 3rd at best and he did that. But deep down, i wanted Lance to win.
With a new team next year Lance & Johan Bruyneel will again prove formidable. He will return to France in 2010 with the intention of winning his 8th Tour title, and he'll have full say into who he brings with him to his new Radioshack team. Already Chris Horner, Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden are rumored to be riding for Armstrong's new team, and other top names can't be far behind. Expect that Armstrong will come to France with an extremely strong squad to support him, as he looks to teach Contador a lesson in teamwork and tactics.
The Schlecks and Saxo Bank.
Bjarne Riis is the best mind in cycling. He did not have the strongest team in the tour but had the best brains. The team managed to win 3 stages, hold the yellow jersey for 7 days and beat everyone but Contador. Andy Schleck needs to get faster in the time trial or they need to put more hills and less time trials in the tour next year! Andy did everything he could to break contador but it was not going to happen, at 24 though they have a long rivalry ahead of them and I see him as the only man possibly able to topple Contador - but he needs a big improvement in the TT. He has a brother that is willing to die for him and a team of workhorses that are willing and able to put everything on the line. They gambled last year and won with sastre, this year they gambled, threw everything at Contador and came up second.
I cant wait for next years rematch.
DopingNone.
Nada.
No positive tests in the tour. Drug free. No scandals and nothing for the cycling bashers to grab hold of. fantastic. But of course Greg Lemond still finds the time to sledge the winner and throw a few accusations in. Bitter old man.
Britseh?
The british track cycling renaissance has now spread to the road. Cavendish was awesome, Wiggins surprised everyone with his amazing form in the mountains, not bad for a guy who usually only rides 4000m on the track! David Millar put in his usual honest performance as well. A british team from 2010. Watch out!
The Youngsters.Contador is 26, Kreuziger 23, Andy Schleck 24, Vincenzo Nibali 24. The elder Schleck is 29, Wiggins is 29. The only guys in the top 10 this year over 30 are Armstrong , Vande Velde and Kloden. Add to that Tony Martin 24, Nicholas Roche 24 , Brice Feillu 24 & Robert Gesink 23 and then the sprinters - Gerald Ciolek 22, Tylre Farrar 25 and of course, Mark Cavendish 24.
This year was the changing of the guard. Out with Sastre, Evans, Pereiro in with a new world order.
Cycling is in good hands.
The Lowlights:Cadel EvansJust plain bad. Always has an excuse and always has something to whinge about. In 9 years as a pro he seems to have learned nothing about cycling or the media or how to speak like a normal human being. Was second overall in 2 very weak years, he is a consistent rider. World class but consistent. Not a world beater. This year he climbed poorly, time trialled fairly. Sure he can't help the fact that his team recruited Thomas Dekker, a very capable climber who was previously with rabobank. Before the tour he unfortunately had a positive result of a re-test of an out-of-competition sample taken in December 2007. Whoops.
But the reality is Evans was either very out of form (on paper he wasn't, he was 2nd at the Dauphine Libere, his main lead up for the 3rd year in a row) Sick (which was denied by his team) or just plain old cracked the shits. Took his bat and ball and went home. I'm leaning towards the latter. He said on his website it was 'fun' riding in the back of the race in stage 17, losing almost 30 minutes to the leaders. Fun eh? how much must his bosses have liked reading that!
He has been told he will not be leder in 2010 - young gun Van den Broek will be. Pack your bags Cadel, there are a few new teams on the way Sky (British), Renault (french in name but looking at being backed by a spanish bank and Fernando Alsonso - possible destination of one Alberto Contador) and of course Lance's team radioshack.
Cuddles is going to struggle from here on in.
Carlos SastreNow he might really see how lucky he was to be on Team CSC (saxo bank)last year when they ground the opposition into the dust up L'Alpe d'Huez and the schleck brothers knocked all his opposition out and gave him the yellow jersey. Sure he can climb but he is a grinder. Took the money and ran to Cervelo who then left Simon Gerrans, who was being groomed as his domestique in the hills, out of the race for going for a ride with Lance Armstrong and apparently giving away secrets. You will not see him in contention again. I hope Simon Gerrans leaves Cervelo and is riding for Lance next year!
Tom Boonen3rd positive test for Cocaine - out of competition. Court rules he can start in the race after the tour wanted to ban him. Quickstep should not have bothered. Team did not work for him once, the basically sat up in protest and didn't even offer the former world champ and green jersey winner a lead out. They should have gone with Aussie Allan Davis. Boonen then crashed a number of times and said he had a virus. Sure.
The TV.Why cant we get all stages from start to finish? Especially mountain stages?
Apparently there is no "feed".
not good enough in this multimedia world.
back to the good though....
The SelectionsBefore the race this was my
predicted top 10......
1. Alberto Contador - tick
2. Andy Schleck - tick
3. Lance Armstong - tick
4. Denis Menchov (horrible)
5. Cadel Evans (ditto)
6. Michael Rogers (crashed a few times)
7. Levi Leipheimer (crashed and out)
8. Carlos Sastre (very poor)
9. Frank Schleck (5th)
10. Roman Kreuziger (9th)
So the first 3 in order was not terribly hard to pick but we had that, if only the trifecta was a bet type here. This neatly segues into the betting. Cavendish was backed to win a number of stages (not hard- best price was $3.25!) but the big result was Franco Pellizotti for the polka Dots at $24. he saluted and a decent profit was ensured.
Back again next year!
