Endurance Magazine’s Tour de France Viewers Guide

By Chad Andrews with Contributing Writer JoE Silva

The Ghost of Tours Past?

Every year in late October there’s a great pause felt around the pro cycling world as the organizers of the Tour de France pull back the curtain on the following year’s route. Just two and a half months after they climbed out of their saddles on the Champs-Élysées, most of the top contenders gather once again to get a preview of what lies up the road. It might seem premature to some, but it’s simply a marker of just how important the race is, was, and will be. And for the 2009 installment of the Tour, the drama surrounding the following year’s race had begun to swarm the event even earlier.

With 45 seconds of video, Lance Armstrong had turned the whole picture of the 96th edition of the Tour upside down. With the announcement of his comeback to racing, Armstrong changed the dynamics of the race, of a team, and the sport as a whole. The Tour’s most successful rider, a man who was essentially the face of professional cycling to most Americans was back in the game. All of the race favorites, even those on his new team, would now have to contend with the specter of the Texan’s total dominance of the Tour for the better part of a decade.

In reality though, there are no guarantees for Lance or for any of the other 200 or so riders arriving for the Tour kickoff in Monaco. Three weeks of hard, hard racing can offer no promises. It is still a tricky amalgamation of one-day events designed to suit different skill sets at different times. The sprinters of the pro peloton will be looking to the stages with flat finishes where they can accumulate points towards the green jersey; the climbers look to the mountains and the polka dot jersey, while the men who are hunting the overall win and the yellow jersey will have to plot bigger strategies. To win the Tour de France you cannot lose large amounts of time during any of the key stages where you have to climb well or race solo against the clock. And most importantly you can’t do it alone. A Tour winner is an exceptional athlete without question, but an exceptional athlete without an exceptional team around him might as well stay home or be prepared to settle for something other than first place.

Of Mountains and Men

This layout for this year’s race is different in that the normal crescendos of the Tour are altered somewhat. Inside of the first nine days of racing are a technical individual time trial, a team time trial, and a hard mountain top finish on the 7th day in the saddle. Then there are two more mountain stages in the Pyrénées before the first rest day. This makes this a particularly intense and exciting week of racing. The following week will see the focus placed squarely on the sprinters with the exception of stage 15, which includes a finish atop the Swiss ski resort of Verbier. This sets up the action for the Tour’s final week, which will see more medium to difficult climbs, a 40-kilometer time trial and the pièce de résistance – Mont Ventoux.

If there was one item on this year’s agenda that caused Tour watchers to catch their breath at the big unveil last year was the sight of Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day of the race – the oft abused term of “epic” suddenly applied. Having been used to seeing the Tour being wrapped up with an individual time trial that pits the surviving Tour rivals against the clock for the final test of supremacy, the appearance of the 21.6 kilometer climb is a game changer of an altogether different level. Is the most brutal of climbs? No, but it’s a huge effort to appear so close to the finale. The top of Ventoux looks like those barren lunar landscapes we got used to seeing grainy images of via the Apollo missions. It’s an unpleasant effort because there is nothing to shield you from the heat or the wind – meaning that only the truly strong will survive. A rider who is feeling the fatigue of three weeks of top-shelf racing in his legs cannot afford to be inattentive on Ventoux, else the whole Tour could ride away from him. If there was ever a Tour stage custom-made to gathering around the barbecue or at your favorite local sports bar where you can freely shout at the screen, this is it.

Cyclists to Watch

So given all of the above, who are the men to watch out for at this year’s Tour? For starters, if Lance Armstrong’s Team Astana can get their financial issues with their sponsor settled and actually start the race (the Kazakh-backed squad has had trouble getting its riders paid…), they will undoubtedly be the heavy hitters. His Spanish teammate Alberto Contador is not only showing good form, but having not been allowed to defend his 2007 championship in last year’s event when the entire squad was banned from the race, he will be eager to reassert his authority over the race. The question is whether Lance, now fully recovered from his collarbone injury and having done fairly well at the Giro D’Italia, is willing to slip in a support role for Contador. And then there’s Levi Leipheimer who has been riding well all year long for Astana and could get Armstrong to throw his weight behind him if Lance finds himself fully restored to his Tour winning potential.

Last year’s winner was the man now riding for the Cervélo TestTeam, Carlos Sastre. Sastre is a climber par excellence, and with a team that’s had a great debut season, he cannot be discounted. Sastre wore a CSC jersey when he won the Tour last year, and the vacuum left by his departure is being filled by the dynamic duo of brothers Frank and Andy Schleck. Both are sound climbers, but they are weak as individuals against the clock, but with Ventoux sucking some of the importance out of the time trials this year, their chances have gone up.

Then there’s the man who won this year’s Giro D’Italia with a super aplomb – Rabobank’s Denis Menchov. Strong and leaner than he’s been seen in a long while, Menchov proved he’s got all the skills and the will to fight to the very finish for victory. Normally a safe bet as a top ten rider, now anything outside of the podium would be a surprise. Last year’s pleasant surprise was the appearance in the fifth place slot of America’s Christian Vande Velde (Garmin-Slipstream). Vande Velde injured himself during stage three of the Giro, but if he is at 100% by Tour time, he will have a shot at making good use of all the confidence and savvy he picked up last year.

When you start to think about dark horses, the narrow field of contenders for the general classification explodes exponentially. There are so many “what if” scenarios in an event this long and hard, that the pool of talent intent on showing up with their A game makes the Tour, particularly this year, an event not to be missed.

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Chad Andrews is the President and Founder of Totalcyclist LLC.  He has two Endurance Training Facilities in the Charlotte area: Uptown and South Charlotte.  Chad is a USA Cycling Level 1 Coach.  http://www.totalcyclist.com/.

JoE Silva has been a journalist for nearly 20 years and has written for VeloNews, Road, ProCycling, Cyclesport, and Road Bike Action.  In case you’re wondering about the capital “E” in his name – it belongs there. Don’t ask me why. If you really need to know, just ask JoE.