Peloton Blog

Amazing Tour de France pictures

If you want to see some amazing pictures from the Tour de France right now check out this site: The Big Picture

I really like them for all the pictures they do and to see a selection from the Tour was a pleasant surprise.

Riccò out of the Tour

I honestly thought the doping news would be limited to riders like Beltran that are in the later part of the careers and other riders not in the top of the GC. The news today about Riccò is obviously disappointing. I was just beginning to really like him as a rider as well. I hope it is just him on the Saunier Duval-Scott team and nobody else. Though right now I look at Stage 10 and am reminded of the Gewiss-Ballan team at the La Flèche Wallonne in 1994, but hope it is not like that.

With Riccò gone it is hard to tell what impact if any it will have on the GC. We lost the rider that animated the race the most. The CSC team with the Schleck brothers and Sastre are the obvious candidates to fill this role. The one competition this has the biggest impact is the King of the Mountain as Riccò had a decent lead there. In fact 4 of the top 10 riders in the King of the Mountains were Saunier Duval–Scott riders. It is incredibly unusual for that competition not to be effectively done by the time they get to the 2nd mountain range in the Tour.

First tour psotive drug test - Beltrán EPO

The news today is the Beltrán tested positive for EPO (news) in a test after the first stage.

2 or 3 years ago this would have been big news, but I am not sure if it is today. He is one of those riders from that period that I think we assumed most were doing some sort of doping. At this point I think it goes into the no big surprise category and there goes another one. The house cleaning that has gone on the past 2 years I thought was going to damage pro cycling more then help it, but now I have changed my mind.

There has been a difference in racing this year other then the French riders doing better then in the past decade. The stars are still winning races, but it is from more aggressive racing and when one team tries to control a stage race they have failed. We are not seeing one team ride at the front for several days in the row with a pace so high that nobody can attack.

Tour week 1

There were two very entertaining days of racing so far in the Tour de France this year. Stage 6 (results) had the earliest mountain top finish we have seen in the Tour, and then today’s stage 7 (results) had a nice little climb right before the end that got a small leading group of top riders away. The first week of the Tour has been the most interesting first week in a very long time. With the top riders all being listed in the 10 in GC from the first stage on. This sort of course has been seen commonly in the Giro and Vuelta for the past 20 years, but not in the Tour.  I know I like to see this racing then the totally flat stages of with a small break out all day and then caught 10km from the line and then a big pack finish (2 minutes of excitement packed into 4 hours)

So far the only big surprise has been Cuengo. The last 2 days really should have been perfect for him, but he has been in the 2nd or 3rd group. I thought his TT was solid and he expected him to do better the past 2 days. Valverde, Menchov, Evans, the Schleck bothers, and Sastre all have all ridden strong. Sammy Sanchez, Oscar Pereiro, and Stijn Devolder are all in the top 11 and ready to take advantage of any chance they get. American VandeVelde is looking great! Nice to see him doing so well in the Tour. For some reason he was never on the USPS teams tour selection after he crashed with Heras in the TTT one year.

Tour stage 4 Expectations met and not met

Expectations were high for Cancellara. Everyone (at least myself and lots of others) thought he would win the TT and the only question was if he would take the yellow jersey. So his 5th place (results) in the TT was not expected.

Schumacher was a surprise, but that is because he is so inconsistent. He rips out a performance today, the Giro 2 years ago, or Amstel Gold last year, but then goes into hiding for a few months until his next surprise. If it wasn’t for the Dauphiné Libéré TT a few weeks ago and his win there then

Valverde’s ride today would be about where most would have expected him. So like Cancellara the expectations were higher then what he delivered.

Evans met expectations and did what he had to do. Really the TT did very little maybe put a little more pressure on Evans as now he looks like the favorite when after stage 1 it was Valverde.  That is what makes this so fun.

time gaps in stage 1

In today’s first stage of the Tour de France there were two good examples of how time splits are done between groups of riders. I don’t know how they exactly determine the distance in the Tour, but the local stage races I have worked at the timing people have always looked for a full barrier to be visible between riders to give a different time. Certainly with the timing and camera equipment available today it is possible to determine when a 1 second gap is there, but having a visual rule certainly helps if there is any dispute.

The 1-second difference today between Valverde and Gilbert is easy to see. The six second gap between 13th place Carrara and 14th Sastre is a little trickier. There clearly was a gap between the two riders, but only a second or two. Since a new time was given it was the real time so the 7 seconds is the time back from Valverde. If they could have closed the 1-second gap it would have saved the 30 plus rider group 6 seconds. In flatter stages with a large field there is a chance for even bigger time differences. A small gap allowed at the end of the race can mean a 10+ second difference since it takes so long for a pack of riders to roll through the finish.

Tour stage 1

The Tour has not been very experimental for many years. The biggest question in the past decade about the course has been if there is a TTT and what the rules would be for it. This year they showed a little more creativity with no prologue TT and did a road stage that actually had a challenging finish. This sort of finish is common in the Giro, but for the first week of the Tour we are usually stuck with stages that the last 30 km are dead flat so the only reason an overall contender appears in the top 10 is that he was riding at the front just to stay out of the way. In today’s stage the results looked like what you would expect from Liege-Bastogne-Liege in April with many of the over all contenders being in the top including stage winner Valverde.

The next 2 stages are more traditional first week stages for the Tour, but I expect in one of them for a small break to get away and end up 3-4 minutes ahead of the field. There are just not enough teams this year that will work hard to get a big field sprint.

My pick for Tour '08 - Valverde

The old Usenet acronym TIOOYK “There is only one you know” for the Tour de France is certainly applicable once we hit July. Sure the Giro and Vuelta are often better races, but for good or bad it all comes down to the Tour.

You can look on all the different web sites and everyone says the same thing. Evans is the favorite, and Valverde, Menchov, Cunego, Sastre are right behind. The order of the other 4 is the only thing that varies. As much as I would like to think someone will deliver a surprise win like Sanchez, one of the Shlecks, Ricco, or Jimmy Casper (okay that is a stretch), but history shows very few surprises in the Tour. If you look at the winners only Pereiro stands out as a surprise with hindsight. In the past 30 years only Fignon and Lance in their first wins, and maybe LeMond in ‘88 were a surprise at the time. All other winners were listed as favorites at the start of that years Tour. While certainly one of the more open Tours in the past 15+ years the list of potential winners is still less then 10. Assuming there is not a breakaway like 2 years ago opening the door for Pereiro.

So I am going with one of my favorite riders Valaverde to win it all and hope that for a change the big story will not be some top rider being kicked out.

No Contador or Astana for ASO

Astana is out of all ASO races (Tour de France, Paris-Nice, Roubaix, Leiege, Fleche, and Tours). I will still maintain that Astana is this years Unibet team and a way for the race organizers to show they will not be told who they can have at their races by the UCI. This team has undergone a major change before (from the Saiz run ONCE and Liberty Seguros to Astana) and the problems continued. So that is what ASO is using to justify their decision. So no Contador the defending champ at either Paris-Nice or the Tour.

The Tour has snubbed top teams/riders before under suspicion. Francesco Casagrande and his team in the 90’s and Pantani after ’99 were not invited. They passed over Cipollini and his team in favor of a “lesser” French team. By their own choice in the early 80’s neither Moser nor Saronni ever came to the Tour.

While I think Astana is not being treated fairly it is not the end of the world or even a major blow to pro cycling. It would be great to see Contador race, but if this means Slipstream gets in that will be exciting as well.

Just like the NCAA basketball tourney selection there is usually some controversy over at least one team. Unlike the past 2 years a team could not buy its way in via the UCI. They have to buy their way in other ways. Notice that after no Saunier Duval in last years Tour of California (they were not invited) this year Scott became a sponsor of the race and the team is there.

The season is back

The new season is here so I figured I would start writing again. The past year had been difficult to follow and get excited about with all the drug stories. Not to mention other things in my life that took me away from paying attention to the good parts of bike racing.

The season really began this week. Sure there was the excellent Tour Down Under and even the GP d'Ouverture La Marseillaise race in France, but for me the season begins with the Etoile de Bessèges stage race in France.  Today won by Iouri Trofimov joining such superstar winners of the past like Frddy Bichot and Jan Wijands. Sure the winners list is a little less then the Tour (Adri Van der Peol and Robbie McEwen are probably the best names on the list), but it is pro racing and it is easy to think the guys that are doing well now are the on the verge of breaking out.  In the 80’s had to wait to see the color pictures of the new jerseys and reading about the race in the issue of Winning that came out in April. Now here in America we can see color pictures the day of, or watch live feeds for many races. I also walked to school uphill both ways in feet of snow.

The year did start out with some fun political controversy between the organizers of the Grand Tours and the UCI. The ProTour that was of dubious value anyway is now even less significant. We had the Giro not inviting 4 ProTour teams and the Tour hinting they might not invite some as well. It looks like Astana might become this years target like Unibet was last year, and just a team to punish as a means to get at the UCI. While the Astana team of last year certainly was suspect for a lot of things the team this year is totally different. Still it is an easy way for the organizers to show their independence. We are going back to the old way of team selection where sponsorship dollars, politics, and regional favoritism play as big of a roll as who is on the team. There certainly are some advantages to the old way rather then a team that has enough money to pay the UCI. I have always said that I hated seeing Euskaltel–Euskadi doing races like Flanders and Roubaix while watching some of the French teams send their lowest level riders to races like the Giro and Vuelta. Give me the smaller teams in the Giro or Vuelta as they become the main race for the sponsor and the riders do everything they can to prove their value

Even the Tour de France has given the nod to “lesser teams” that have a good story over the years. The Columbians raced there as a national amateur team in ’83, the 7-11 team in ’86 was not one of the top teams at that time, and they invited the ANC-Halfords from England to do the ’87 Tour on the anniversary of Tom Simpsons death.