Photo by By scarlatti2004
It was a great tour de France. The best I can ever remember. As I said recently in (Tour)- how quickly you can forget the past problems of pro-cycling when watching a new edition of the tour!
Cadel Evans was a worthy winner. His final time trial was awesome. He was clearly strongest and most consistent rider of the Tour. And dare I say it that I’m even glad for my friends in Australia to have a good old Aussie win the Tour de France.
Andy Schleck will be gutted to be second for third time in a row. But, it is no small compensation that he won perhaps the greatest stages in modern memory. It is so rare for a serious contender to be able to attack 60Km from finish and hold off the rest of the chasers on two climbs. Perhaps he deserved the King of the Mountains, but S.Sanchez was also a worthy winner.
The Schlecks helped to make it a really great race, but I wonder if they fear whether they can ever win? In future tours there could easily be more than 42Km of time trials, and if there is – they know it will be even harder to win.
Thomas Voeckler was simply marvellous. It’s great to have an underdog fighting so hard, defying predictions and holding on for so long. I did get slightly frustrated on last mountain stage where he was wasting so much energy in the middle of no-mans land 30secs behind Contador, but if he made a few tactical mistakes, he more than made up for it in sheer determination.
Pierre Rolland (Fra) Team Europcar was also great helping Voeckler in the mountains and to gain a stage win on Alpe d’Huez and white jersey (for best young rider) was a good return.
Mark Cavendish is one of those people I can’t help but like – whatever he does or says. He has a childlike enthusiasm for cycling. He rides on emotion and he speaks his mind, but I’m happy to see such great characters in the sport. He is quite simply the fastest man on two wheels. He deserves the green jersey for not just being consistently the fastest sprinter but also dragging his sprinters frames up so many Alpine passes.
Many other riders had great tours and helped to make it a special tour. As much as I love Mark Cavendish and was glad to see him win 5 stages, I was actually glad a few other sprinters could occasionally get in on the act – A. Griepel (former team mate and big rival). E.Bosan Hagen and T.Hushovd for Norway.
The only downside to the tour was seeing so many crashes in the first week, especially gutting for Bradley Wiggins who would have been up there with the other contenders.
And the best thing about this tour? The racing was so good no time for hardly any mention of Lance Armstrong.
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