Today was to be another typical flat stage: a break, a catch, a bunch sprint finish. It was anything but. For my money, it was the best stage of racing thus far in the 100th Tour.
Something besides mountains and crashes can wreak havoc on a peloton and GC hopefuls. Crosswinds.
Crosswinds – the riders hate them, fans love them. Today’ stage 13 was a perfect example of how crosswinds can shake up the overall classification. Some guys gained time and moved up, some riders lost time and slipped down the GC.
Stage 13 started out predictably enough – the break du jour had about a 3.5 minute lead. The peloton, driven primarily at the front by the Lotto-Belisol, Omega-QuickStep and Argos-Shimano teams. The only difference between today and yesterday at this point was they weren’t allowing the break to get as far ahead.
With about 110k to go, all hell broke loose. Seriously, the race blew apart.
With Omega-QuickStep at the front, you could instantly see the wind change. OQS fell into an echelon formation and started really pushing the pace. Others didn’t react and were caught unaware and then caught out.
Alejandro Valverde had the misfortune to have a flat in no-mans land. His team car couldn’t get to him, instead Valverde and teammates changed the wheel using a tire from one of the service vehicles. Valverde had 4 teammates helping him, going full gas they only got within 12 seconds of the main group – then boom – they fell so far back they chose to sit up and wait for the 2nd group containing Marcel Kittel and a lot of BMC riders and others, it was a large group.
Kittel had several Argo-Shimano teammates and they worked with Valverde’s Movistar team to try and bridge the gap to the front group containing the yellow jersey and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th placed riders in the GC. They didn’t gain any time because once the Belkin guys in the front group got word of the 2nd placed Valverde being dropped they, along with OQS, drove the pace, widening the gap further.
If you’ve watched the Tour very long you’re probably aware there is a code of conduct among riders that says basically, you don’t take advantage of a rider when they’ve had a mechanical or crashed. This rule generally pertains to the higher placed GC guys, maybe the top 5 or the top 3. Valverde, as I mentioned, held 2nd place. Belkin went to the front for one reason, to move their 3rd and 6th placed guys up. Both were in the front group.
Meanwhile the front group quickly reeled in the break. The polka-dot jersey, Pierre Rolland also had a flat and even though he was back on the bike fairly quickly he never made contact with the main group again. Like Movistar, Rolland and teammates ended up in the 2nd group and working with Movistar to try and cut the gap – with absolutely no luck.
About 30k from the finish we had big fireworks in the main group. Alberto Contador and his 4 Saxo-Tinkoff teammates attacked the yellow jersey! They caught Froome completely off-guard, quickly opening up a 10 second gap. Froome tried to follow initially, then looked behind, saw no one else was going to chase and sat up. He didn’t even try to catch on to the 14 rider group, tactically he should have. He may not have been successful, but he looked vulnerable when he didn’t even attempt to go.
Froome is vulnerable now because his team is vulnerable – down to 7 riders. They showed they were vulnerable in Stage 8 and they certainly were today. Teams will attack them even more in the Alps. 😀
Besides Contador and his merry men in the lead group, there were Belkin’s 3rd and 6th placed riders, Cavendish and 2 teammates and Sagan plus a teammate. The grouped worked together very well and managed to grow their gap to just over 1 minute. Behind them in the yellow jersey group, Sky did have a couple of guys go to the front to drive, but to no avail. Oddly, Froome was near the back of this group. You would think after getting attacked and dropped by Contador he would have tried to stay near the front. Maybe he couldn’t – if true, that shows he’s vulnerable too. 😀
The race did end in a bunch sprint – a small bunch – Cavendish had a good jump on Sagan, easily taking the win.
The big news of the day? Contador, Mollema, Kreuziger, Ten Dam all gained 1:09 on Froome. Valverde and Costa lost 9:54 slipping from 2nd and 9th to 16th and 18th respectively. The only good news for Movistar was Quintana held on to 8th place. Those were the big shakeups in the GC, but many gained or lost places in the overall classification.
What an extraordinary day of racing! With the GC contenders smelling blood with Froome and the Sky team, the final week starting Sunday on Mont Ventoux should be fun.
Stage 14: Look for the break to win tomorrow (but who knows), maybe Thomas Voeckler.
I can’t recall the last time I screamed with joy (and surprise) during a sprint finish.
Not only could Phil Liggett not believe someone was going to come from behind Mark Cavendish (after Cavendish had already begun his sprint) and beat him to the line – Cavendish couldn’t believe it either.
Just before Cavendish hit the finish line he looked over at Marcel Kittel and apparently couldn’t believe his eyes. Kittel hit the finish line perfectly throwing his bike at just the right moment to take the stage win, finishing half a wheel length ahead of Cavendish.
As Kittel crossed the line he didn’t even celebrate, Cavendish stared at him in disbelief probably not quite believing he actually got pipped at the line.
I don’t know what Cavendish was thinking, but what many of us were thinking was – Justice.
In the 2 days since Stage 10 when Cavendish knocked Kittel leadout Tom Veelers off his bike causing him to hit the pavement hard, he has had urine thrown on him, been uninvited to a Dutch race and today lost a stage he and most everyone else thought he would win.
Priceless.
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The fat lady in France, the one dressed in yellow, she’s singing.
Short of something catastrophic, Chris Froome will win the 100th Tour de France. I said it after Stage 8 and all he did in the time-trial today is add to his lead.
Froome’s closest rival Alejandro Valverde, is 3:25 down. That isn’t time Valverde is likely to make up on him. Sure, there is still a battle for the top 2-5 spots, with only seconds separating them. There is also more exciting racing and courageous individual efforts still to come, but no story of the Tour is as compelling as the race for Yellow.
Instead of that tight race for the yellow jersey we were hoping for, the biggest question floating around Tour de France fandom is whether Froome and Sky in general are clean or have their “marginal gains†– which aren’t marginal at all in reality – come as the result of performance enhancing drugs?
I’ve stated how I feel previously – to me the data – past and present – speaks for itself. People much more knowledgeable than me have written extensively about it so I’ve decided to post excerpts from a couple of excellent articles I’ve recently read.
“The simplest place to start the analysis is with Froome’s time itself. He took 23:14 to cover the 8.9 km distance at an average gradient of 7.46 percent. AX3 has been included in the Tour five times, three times during the doping era (2001, 2003, and 2005) and twice in the “new generation†(2010 and 2013). With this context in mind, we pulled the top 10 times from cycling archivist @ammattipyoraily‘s AX3 Domaines All-Time Top 100 List:
Aside for Froome’s time, every single performance in the top 10 has come from a rider during cycling’s known doping era. With the 3rd fastest ever, his time beat the top efforts from Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso, and even beat two of three times for Armstrong.â€
I also recommend reading Ross Tucker’s blog “The Science of Sport†and following him (@scienceofsport) and Puchowicz (@veloclinic) on Twitter for their insights.
It is encouraging to know that there are fans and journalists studying and analyzing available data on riders in an effort to identify performances that appear to be “enhanced†i.e., “not normalâ€.
When organizations charged with performing the watchdog function don’t, citizens and journalists must do what they can to shine the spotlight when and where it is needed. That is precisely what Puchowicz, Tucker and others are trying to do.
Just like many of us, they love the sport of cycling and want to see it get beyond the culture of doping so prevalent in its past and to whatever extent it still is.
“Cycling is where it is, in part, because too many people who might have added value early were silenced or cast aside as being problematic, unwanted because they ‘spat in the soup’. The result, to paraphrase a piece by Paul Kimmage, is thatthe denial of doping hurt cycling more than doping. And the easiest form of denial is not to openly deny doping ("It doesn’t happen"), it’s to distract from the debate by diverting questions and pointing to others, which seems, in my opinion, to happen too often. We all hope, even the most cynical, that the riders we watch today are clean, or at least cleaner than those of ten years ago. The mere existence of ongoing debate is, I hope, indicative that people want change and want to believe. Few are maliciously cynical, even if they have by now forgotten their real purpose of becoming vocally anti-doping.
And so I would hope that those who defend the sport will at least find it possible to recognize the origins of the skepticism, and why they should not be trying to silence or divert the questions and allegations, but rather encourage them and heed the solutions they may reveal. The mistrust of cycling can be turned into constructive feedback, unless it is diverted through defensiveness.â€
Sprinter extraordinaire, Mark Cavendish did something today that would have resulted in most other sprinters being disqualified from the stage at a minimum or from the Tour as has happened in the past (Mark Renshaw in 2010 for one). For Cavendish though, there were no consequences to his actions.
A video is worth a thousand words so see for yourself in this video by NBC Sports and Steephilltv:
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Here’s a video from YouTube (CanalF10) from the 2010 Tour when Renshaw, Cavendish’s teammate at the time was disqualified from the Tour and sent home for head-butting:
In my mind Cavendish should have been disqualified from the sprint (resulting in no place and no points) at a minimum. What he did was far worse than Renshaw’s behavior in 2010 yet Cav gets off scott-free.
Excitement and drama kicks off the 2nd week of the Tour today in what we expected to end in a “normal†bunch sprint.
Stage 10 started with a break of 5 riders getting away early. The peloton let them go and then proceeded to bring them back – the usual cat and mouse game. The break never had a chance unless there was either a peloton pileup or a peloton breakup by crosswinds. Neither happened so when the time was right the peloton caught the break and the sprinters teams came to the front.
The wind played a factor in that the GC favorites teams wanted to keep them at the front, sprinters teams wanted to keep their sprinters at the front and had to catch the break – all of which meant the peloton was tightly packed and pace was high. Tensions were definitely high.
Lotto-Belisol and Argos-Shimano have well organized leadouts for their sprinters. Cavendish for the most part does not. Today Greipel and Kittel were delivered perfectly, while Cavendish had to fend for himself. He didn’t have much trouble doing it did he. Regardless though, he has to be frustrated with his team QuickStep and his lack of stage wins. That frustration had to play a part in his shoving Tom Veelers.
Cav being Cav, he said he did nothing wrong. Tour officials doing what they do, protecting the Tour, confirmed through their actions (lack of) that he did nothing wrong. I don’t know how anyone can watch that first video and say he didn’t deliberately put his shoulder into Veelers. Make sure to see the front angle at 1:25.
Stage 11 is a 33k individual time-trial. You have to expect Chris Froome to take more time. Tomorrow should be beautiful, finishing at Mont Saint Michel. Hope they all finish before the tide comes in.
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