Your Drug-Free Tour de France Preview
Get excited for Le Tour with crazed devil spawn!
It’s the first week of July, and one of the best weeks of the year. No, I’m not talking about the barbeques, trips to the beach, or fireworks, I’m talking about Le Tour de France.
Yes, Le Tour, this year relevant not because of doping (well, yet), but because the return of some guy from Austin, Texas. It kicks off in Monaco, with a Time Trial along many of the same roads that Formula 1 uses for their Grand Prix. Remember, cyclists, blood boosters and gambling don’t mix well!
Join me after the jump as I give you five reasons other than Lance to watch this year’s Tour De France.
1. The Course
The Tour’s course always has some consistency: a start in some interesting city, a trip through the Pyrenees, long flat stages, and a trip through the Alps, finishing with a victory lap around the Champs D’Elysee. This year, the word to describe the course is backloaded. The final week in the Alps will be absolute hell on a bicycle. Before the cyclists can make it there, they must negotiate a Team Time Trial for the first time since 2005. TTTs are excellent to watch, as the riders take turns riding in space age helmets breaking the wind for the team with their wheels almost touching each other. It looks something like this:
The Tour will, in all likelihood be decided, on the penultimate day on the famed slopes of Mount Ventoux. Ventoux is one of the hardest mountains in the world to climb, with an average gradient of 8.9%. To give you an idea of just how hard, the next time you go to the gym, pump the elevation on the treadmill all the way up. Then imagine biking up that for 10 miles in very thin air and high winds.
That’s the ride that will decide the Tour.
2. The Favorite
The clear favorite for this year’s Tour is Alberto Contador of Team Astana. Contador, the painfully thin climber pictured on the right, has at the tender age of 26 done something not even Captain Livestrong has done: won all three Grand Tours, cycling’s career grand slam. Bert served notice, winning the Tour in 2007, then the Giro D’Italia and Vuelta Espana in 2008.
Contador is simply the best pure climber on earth, bar none.
If he is undone by anything, it will be his team. Astana have put together an all-star team, including four cyclists who have finished in the top three of the Tour. The team, which includes Lance Armstrong, are nominally riding in support of Alberto, but what happens if one of them gets the Yellow Jersey by winning a time trial, not Contador’s favorite discipline?
Nothing can wreck a rider’s chances faster than dissension within a team.
3. The Bunch Sprints
Okay, so reasons one and two both dealt with what everyone thinks of when they think of the Tour de France, mountains. But there are only seven real days of mountains in the three-week tour.
So what happens on the other days?
The answer: Six hours of boredom followed by ten minutes of madness. (Luckily, you, the viewer, can skip right to the madness.) The flat stages generally end in a bunch sprint, wherein the entire peloton comes charging into some town or city at speeds of over 35 miles an hour, culminating in a mad dash for the line in which the sprinters of the Tour hurtle towards the finish at an astonishing 45 miles per hour. The fastest man on two wheels? That would be Britain’s Mark Cavendish, who won three stages in last year’s Tour.
Oh, and did I mention there are crashes? There are spectacular crashes, as illustrated here, with caustic British narration!
4. Clean Contenders = Clean Tour?
I know this naive paragraph is going to come back to bite me in the ass, but for the first time in recent memory it looks like the contenders for this year’s Tour are by and large clean.
The older contenders, like perpetual second-place finisher Cadel Evans, great American hope Levi Leipheimer, stoic Russian Dennis Menchov, and last year’s winner, Carlos Sastre, have had years of clean testing behind them. The young guns like Andy Schleck and Robert Gesink (both immensely talented climbers) have come of age in a period where doping is no longer condoned by teams. They, too, have always tested clean.
The past three Tours have been marred by second-tier contenders (Floyd Landis, Michael Rasmussen and Ricardo Ricco) biking out of their minds and then testing positive for the blood booster EPO mid-race. While I can’t say the same for the bit players in the peloton who are desperate to hang onto their pro jobs, it looks like 2009 might be the first Tour in a while to not see a serious contender elminated for doping.
5. The Announcers
We in America are used to our bad national announcers. It is easy to find a Joe Morgan type broadcasting a national sporting event and great announcing teams are the exception rather than the rule.
The Tour de France on Versus is the exception, as they have one of the best teams working in Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin. These two British ex-cyclists have been calling the Tour for years, and know their stuff. They have valuable insights for the first time viewer and the cycling diehard, and, unlike certain ESPN personalities, have great catchphrases. For instance, when a rider is attempting a breakaway, he is “dipping into his suitcase of courage.”
It is a treat to watch Le Tour with such an announcing duo.
And, of course, it’s going to be a fun month.
