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Re: Tour de France 09
Awful luck for Rogers, hopefully he can hang in there and continue to create a bit of havoc.
Tonight still promises to be very interesting, but might not be as exciting as I'd thought - it's still a tough mountain stage with a mountain-top finish, but the climb is not supposed to be that hard, and some of the analysts are even saying that Cancellara is a decent chance to stay with the GC riders and keep his yellow joursey.
Apparently it's often super-hot around Andorra at this time of the year, but the forecast is for cloud cover and then a fine mild day, so Evans won't be gruntled about that (anything that makes things hard tends to be to his advantage because he's so good at grinding things out at a strong pace, while riders like Contador rely more on an acceleration that Cadel doesn't have).
The official guide (which is a good read - available at all newsagents), has a note from the organisers that they don't want the race won until the second last day if possible, so the stages in the Pyrenees have not been made as hard as they have been in the past.
But you'd still think that at least one (and hopefully more) of Sastre, Evans, and Menchov will try and get back into it. And Riis has said that if no one else makes a go of it then Saxo Bank will try and make the climb difficult for Astana anyway. One of the interesting things will be whether they protect Cancellara as well as Andy Schleck (and maybe also Frank), or whether Cancellara works for the others.
Awful luck for Rogers, hopefully he can hang in there and continue to create a bit of havoc.
Tonight still promises to be very interesting, but might not be as exciting as I'd thought - it's still a tough mountain stage with a mountain-top finish, but the climb is not supposed to be that hard, and some of the analysts are even saying that Cancellara is a decent chance to stay with the GC riders and keep his yellow joursey.
Apparently it's often super-hot around Andorra at this time of the year, but the forecast is for cloud cover and then a fine mild day, so Evans won't be gruntled about that (anything that makes things hard tends to be to his advantage because he's so good at grinding things out at a strong pace, while riders like Contador rely more on an acceleration that Cadel doesn't have).
The official guide (which is a good read - available at all newsagents), has a note from the organisers that they don't want the race won until the second last day if possible, so the stages in the Pyrenees have not been made as hard as they have been in the past.
But you'd still think that at least one (and hopefully more) of Sastre, Evans, and Menchov will try and get back into it. And Riis has said that if no one else makes a go of it then Saxo Bank will try and make the climb difficult for Astana anyway. One of the interesting things will be whether they protect Cancellara as well as Andy Schleck (and maybe also Frank), or whether Cancellara works for the others.
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