TOUR DE FRANCE ANALYSIS: Bore de France

Australian cyclist’s in the continental peloton are known as hard men. Retired riders Phil Anderson, Neil Stephens and Allan Peiper or current riders Stuart O’Grady and Robbie McEwen can hardly be called as soft nor boring. But current yellow jersey and fellow Aussie Cadel Evans is satin•soft and more boring than waiting for a doctors appointment.

Barring a force majeur, Evans is on his way to winning the Tour de France. But unless he shows panache and attacks in the mountains, this edition will be remembered more on the absence of top notch competitors (Defending champ Alberto Contador, 2nd•runner up Levi Leipheimmer and their team, ASTANA, are absent) rather than Evans’s triumph. In 1999, Lance Armstrong faced the same dilemma, when he won his first TdF without defending champion Marco Pantani, who was out for a high hematocrit count and the champion of 1997, Jan Ullrich, who was nursing a knee injury. But LA validated his win by adding six more consecutive TdF wins.

The second mountain stage was supposed to be explosive. But the explosion was lit instead by the duo or SAUNIER DUVAL riders, Jose Cobo and the eventual winner, Leo Piepoli and SAXON•CSC Frank Schleck. SAXON•CSC had set a very high tempo going into the second to last climb, shredding the TdF dreams of Alejandro Valverde and Damiano Cunego along the slopes of the Tourmalet. SAXON•CSC continued to drive the peloton along the valley going into Huatacam, the dreaded 14km climb to the Pyrenean ski station.

If SAXON•CSC was the then US POSTAL driving the break, you could expect carcasses strewn over the side of the Hautacam as soon as Lance attacked but Evans and the other contender, Russian bore Dennis Menchov, were simply contented on marking each other and thinking of the ITT.

Fortunately for the Evans and Menchov, Ricardo Ricco could only sit behind them as Cobo and Piepoli were his teammates. Carlos Satre, a teammate of Schleck, could do nothing but wait for the tow to set a tempo to limit their losses. In the end, Evans would take away the yellow jersey from Kim Kirchen, who was dropped early but with only a second over Schleck.

I was also disappointed by Sastre after the fine work of Fabian Cancellara and Jens Voight before the final ascent. He only attacked once and that was it. Evans also attacked once and that was it, too!

Unless Evans shows panache or win a mountain stage, his name will never be mentioned in the same sentence as Merckx, Armstrong or Hinault. He will likely be compared to Roger Walkowiak, the 1956 TdF champion who won when he was on a breakaway with 31 riders to gain 18 minutes. He would win nothing significant since. Jaques Goddet, the TdF organizer at that time, wrote in L’Equipe saying that, “the applause (Walkowiak received) sounded like a lamentation”.