Tour De France 2013

[Dave Ewing's Back 'eader]

Lol, typical Cav, he will be like that until he wins another stage, he's known for it, followed a huge strop the one year, by winning the next sprint and was crying like a baby on the podium. He's an intense guy. Thursday is another almost defo sprint finish, i think he will make amends.

I like edgy sportsman, people who wear there heart on there sleeve as i think most of us probably do.

Hope he wins thursday and im sure his team will be told.

Is Tony Martin still struggling with injury? Surely he would drive the OPQS train. If he his will he win tomorrows ITT?

Exactly, probably wouldnt be half the competitor he is if you took that edge away.

Tony Martin came off and crashed badly on the first day, was rumored he was out. He used to do long turns for Cav in the HTC Columbia team - that was an impressive train. If fully fit he has to be one of the favs for tomorrow.

Funny how I agree with this statement when it's concerning people I like. It's often said about the FatScouseGit and it annoys me to buggery.

 

[Shands]

Looks like Robert Millar agrees with us regarding stage 9.

The great escape

The thirty meter gap that Chris Froome closed to go with Alejandro Valverde and Ruben Plaza when they attacked in the valley before the Col de Peyresourde during stage 9 on Sunday may well have been the moment that the Sky rider won this Tour de France. If he hadn't reached the Movistar duo then he was toast and he knew it.

What I found amazing was that the Spaniards then rode with Froome sitting on their wheels instead of aborting the attack, and Contador had to have his team chase the move down. The only way Movistar or Saxo-Tinkoff were going to really put pressure on the race leader was to repeatedly attack him in the valley until he eventually had to let some of them go. Froome's not going to let Valverde or Contador go, but Quintana and Kreuziger he might have, if they kept attacking with teammates then he would have had no choice as you can't chase everything. It didn't matter who from those teams it was, all it needed was a Belkin rider to be in on any move that went clear and the Sky number one would have been in a bad place. Then who would Froome have chased? Nobody with any fire-power. Certainly not Evans or BMC; they were surviving and not Garmin as they still had Hesjedal in front. Froome could have been faced with riding on his own before he got to the next mountain or waiting for teammates, neither of which was a good choice .

I can't imagine a Hinault, LeMond or Merckx letting a lone rival off the hook like the others did on Sunday, even a Contador in top condition would have exploited Sky's weaknesses but therein lies the clue. Contador wasn't good so he kept his team quiet. It was a strange outcome as Valverde and Movistar seemed more pre-occupied with distancing Porte than punishing a vulnerable race leader who must have been nervous to find himself without any friends and still with 100km to the end of the stage.

Looking back, this isn't like the 89 Tour when Greg LeMond found himself in the yellow jersey with a weak ADR team, the background circumstances are different here. Greg was a popular rider, he had won the Tour before and his contract was up so plenty of teams were interested in courting him. I'm not saying Chris Froome is unpopular but Sky's dominance of last year's Tour and their way of racing hasn't made them any friends who they can look to for some aid and Froome also has a solid contract for the next few seasons. These things matter when other teams or riders might be thinking about helping out in a sticky situation.

After the Sky show at Ax-3 Domaines it had looked like we would be seeing a repeat of 2012 but thankfully the other teams have risen to the occasion and it might be a lot more interesting in the last week.

First though, those with pretensions of removing the yellow jersey from Froome's shoulders at some stage in the future have to limit their losses in the Mont-St-Michel TT. I can't see Contador being that close to Froome and it's not really Valverde's strong point so they'll probably be more than three minutes down on GC by the end of Wednesday's stage. The ones to watch will be the Belkin duo of Ten Dam and Mollema along with Kreuziger of Saxo-Tinkoff, guys like Dan Martin and Rui Costa will keep their options open for a top five spot if they can stay within four minutes of the lead too. Quintana will have to get a wriggle on though if he wants to hold off Kwiatkowski for the white jersey classification; the Omega Pharma youngster is one very talented bike rider.

I wonder if we'll see an equal distribution of wins again among the sprinters over the next few flatter stages like we saw during the first week. It seems strange to only have witnessed one victory for Mark Cavendish but then I would have said that also about the Sky machine falling apart so spectacularly too.

Two things I keep forgetting to mention that I really liked from the weekend. The first was the footage Eurosport showed of Froome on Ax-3 Domaines shouting to Richie 'They've dropped, they've all dropped'. The other was Dan Martin after his stage win saying Garmin attacked because they're not just riders but fans of cycling also and nobody want's to see a boring procession like last year - Top man Dan!

On Cav I really love his interviews, there's no media training there at all is they, which is very refreshing! I especially like it when he goes off into convoluted analogies that don't quite work.

Anyway TT today so no feed bag conversation, but I'm sure we'll get one about how Kelly 'didn't have much of a tactic, just go real hard' in between Carlton getting all muddled up by the on screen time gaps that is. Nice to hear Stephen Roche back in the box a couple of times, he's always interesting.

 

[Phil Meup]

Sorry to be a bit slow off the mark on this one but, I can tell some of you guys don't have kids!, I didn't get to see the highlights until 10pm & after that I was too tired to post....
I thought Cav was a bit wreckless but I agree - he gives great interviews & I think he had genuine concern for Tom Veelers.
If you watched the ITV4 7-8 prog, they showed Sky's press conference & mentioned 'an elephant in the room'. They meant doping but I thought they were going to ask about Wiggo (I don't think he's injured!).
Hopefully Froome will go OK today...

 

[Paul Lake's Left Knee]

Sorry to be a bit slow off the mark on this one but, I can tell some of you guys don't have kids!, I didn't get to see the highlights until 10pm & after that I was too tired to post....
I thought Cav was a bit wreckless but I agree - he gives great interviews & I think he had genuine concern for Tom Veelers.
If you watched the ITV4 7-8 prog, they showed Sky's press conference & mentioned 'an elephant in the room'. They meant doping but I thought they were going to ask about Wiggo (I don't think he's injured!).
Hopefully Froome will go OK today...

You think Wiggo doped? Or just they are lying about his injury?

 

[Phil Meup]

The 2nd part.
I love Wiggo - sure he wouldn't dope!
Think he probably had a slight injury but nothing to keep him out of the tour & Brailsford found it convenient (sadly!).

 

[Paul Lake's Left Knee]

The 2nd part.
I love Wiggo - sure he wouldn't dope!
Think he probably had a slight injury but nothing to keep him out of the tour & Brailsford found it convenient (sadly!).

I think he was injured, he was off his bike for a month, so wouldnt have been in any sort of shape, thats what Wiggo said in an interview just before the tour. Sky (and Froome) would have loved his engine in their train.

I agree on doping...

Wiggins' vastly improved form has led some to speculate - with no evidence - about doping, and he even released his own blood profile after finishing fourth at the 2009 Tour to prove he was not taking performance-enhancing drugs or blood doping.

Asked in the post-stage press conference on Sunday evening how he responded to accusations of doping, Wiggins said: "I say they're just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can't ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives.

"It's easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that's ultimately it. Cunts."

Wiggins' team-mate Chris Froome took up the theme on Twitter, writing: "Critics need to wake up and realise that cycling has evolved. Dedication and sacrifice = results. End of story!"

 

[MCFC-alan88]

The 2nd part.
I love Wiggo - sure he wouldn't dope!
Think he probably had a slight injury but nothing to keep him out of the tour & Brailsford found it convenient (sadly!).

Didn't they say the same about Armstrong?

 

[Paul Lake's Left Knee]

The 2nd part.
I love Wiggo - sure he wouldn't dope!
Think he probably had a slight injury but nothing to keep him out of the tour & Brailsford found it convenient (sadly!).

Didn't they say the same about Armstrong?

The sport and drug testing is totally different now to Armstrong's day when the whole field was juiced up.

 

[Phil Meup]

i think more might come of Wiggo not being in the tour in the fullness of time.
You've got to admit - it's really unusual for the defending champion not to ride!

 

[MCFC-alan88]

The 2nd part.
I love Wiggo - sure he wouldn't dope!
Think he probably had a slight injury but nothing to keep him out of the tour & Brailsford found it convenient (sadly!).

Didn't they say the same about Armstrong?

The sport and drug testing is totally different now to Armstrong's day when the whole field was juiced up.

Like in most things, the technology to hide the drugs is much more advanced than the technology to find the drugs simply because there's more money to be had.