Paris: Alberto Contador of Astana will start as the Tour de France favourite next week but the battle for the race’s coveted yellow jersey may take a few unexpected twists and turns on its 3,459.5km trip to Paris.
The 96th edition of the race clicks into gear in Monaco on July 4 with a 15.5km time trial that could see Astana’s official team leader battling Swiss ace Fabian Cancellara for the right to wear the race’s famous tunic.
After a fourth stage team time trial over 39km in which some contenders could lose precious seconds, the first hostilities will kick off over three days of climbing in the Pyrenees, starting on stage seven.
By then Contador should know whether he has internal, as well as external, forces working against him. Since the arrival of seven-time winner Lance Armstrong Astana now have two other potential leaders, and they are both American: Levi Leipheimer and Armstrong.
Armstrong’s first participation since retiring after his record seventh win in 2005 should, at least, help deflect unwanted media attention from Contador.
But with just over a week to go questions remain over whether Contador has the full backing of 37-year-old Armstrong, and the manager who orchestrated his seven Tour triumphs, Johan Bruyneel. While readily praising Contador’s talents as “the best stage racer in the world”, on the eve of the Milan-San Remo classic in March Armstrong was coy when asked his Tour intentions.
“It would be a shame if I did not help Alberto if he is doing better than I am. Having said that, I am going to work every day as hard as I can,” said Armstrong. It’s no wonder Contador earlier this month described Armstrong as “just another team-mate”, a situation not helped by the fact they have barely raced together.
Whether sparks fly inside Astana remains to be seen. But elsewhere Contador will have enough to keep him occupied when the race moves from the Pyrenees towards Burgundy then across to the potentially tricky medium-mountain stages in the Vosges.
Contador could then fall victim to, or benefit from, the attacks and counter attacks that are likely to pepper the remaining five mountain stages from Colmar on stage 13 to stage 20’s potential race decider up the legendary Mont Ventoux.
Australian Cadel Evans, runner-up to Contador in 2007 and Spaniard Carlos Sastre last year, will begin with the usual, but no less respected, refrain: “the Tour can’t be won in a day, but it can be lost in a day”.
Physically, Evans is on form - as his second consecutive runner-up place at the Dauphine Libere race on June 14 attests.
And perhaps this year the Aussie can hope to benefit from the fact that Astana are back in the race: one theory suggests Evans, and indeed any other challenger, just has to duck and weave his way through the bullets when the bigger favourites start firing in the mountains.
Depending on the support he is afforded by key teammates on the climbs, Evans - who finished only 58secs behind Sastre last year - could, on the other hand, suffer from Astana’s presence.
And, three weeks of racing is not like one week. Last year’s fourth place finisher, Denis Menchov, preferred a stiffer test of his yellow jersey credentials at the Tour of Italy last month and came through with flying colours by winning the Giro d’Italia’s pink jersey for the first time.
Menchov, also a two-time Tour of Spain winner, is a wily racer who can climb and time trial. And, occasionally, shows glimpses of race aggression. The Tour has been won by Spaniards since Armstrong retired in 2005, but whether Sastre can continue that short tradition remains to be seen. Since his vistory last year the 34-year-old Spaniard has switched from the CSC team to Cervelo which has yet to show its full potential on the Tour. CSC, now called Saxo Bank following a change of sponsor, can be one of the strongest teams in the peloton when they put their mind to it - as Sastre may know, to his benefit or to his cost. The Danish outfit run by disgraced 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis will pin its main hopes on Andy Schleck, a solid climber who has been working to improve his weaker event of the time trial.- AFP |
