The Eneco Tour was a great race with short time trials, great racing and excellent sprint finishes. Quickstep’s textbook perfect lead out to deliver Tom Boonen to the win in his hometown while wearing the world champion’s jersey was magic. It was also great to watch Eki seting a blistering pace a couple of times on the final stage as he was working to protect George Hincapies race lead. Eneco was Ekimov‘s final race tour, he will be racing at the one day classic Grand Prix Plouay and then stepping into the shoes of a DS this Labor Day Weekend at the USA Cycling Professional Championships when George and some of the other Dicovery boys make their bids to wear the champions jersey. (OLN will broadcast the coverage of the champonships on Sunday, September 10th.)
Unfortunately as great as the Eneco Tour was to watch, the finish was significantly marred by spectator interference and, in my opinion, poor judging robbing George of a much deserved win. Stefan Schumacher, who put in a beautiful performance during the tour, made it perfectly clear he did not want the victory the way it was. Unfortunately it was a hard situation made worse by a bad judges decision.
While I’ve always been a fan of George and root for him, especially during the classics, I am beginning to believe that maybe, just maybe, he really is cursed.
Vuelta Ramping Up
The Vuelta a España started today and we watched the time trial in the late afternoon. One thing I like about Cycling.tv is if I choose or have to miss the live broadcast of the stage I can catch the rebroadcast later the same day, or the highlights anytime later. I avoided all the cycling web sites until after we could watch the stage as well. ‘Fraid with school I’ll have to do that for almost all of the stages.
Today’s prologue was a bit different, being a TTT. There were few real surprises in store as the CSC team (Carlos Sastre, Fabian Cancellara, Volodymir Gustov, Lars Bak, Kurt Asle Arvesen, Inigo Cuesta, Marcus Ljungqvist, Nicki Sørensen and Stuart O’Grady) dominated the event and helped Carlos Sastre into the golden fleece — his first grand tour leaders jersey.
The only big surprise really came from Gerolsteiner as they lost their leader in a messy transition through a roundabout. Riders in front of David Rebellin slowed abruptly as they went though a small dip in the road and into a roundabout. Unfortunately David couldn’t stop himself from touching wheels and going down rather hard into the turn. While 6 men from Gerolsteiner finished the stage 19″ off the CSC time, they left their main contender for the GC (and another rider) to limp in 2′50″ behind the race leader Sastre. Maybe the DS figured waiting for and pulling Rebellin to the finish would take too long in such a short ride. Of course maybe Rebellin wasn’t going to be the leader after all (cetainly won’t be now)? Maybe they have decided to pull for Markus Fothen (second in the TdF Young Rider this year) instead? … I don’t know, but it was not a good way to start the Vuelta.
From PelotonJim we learned that the Vuelta this year is they will be using some of the camera angles and advances we saw and enjoyed on Cycling.tv for the Deutschland Tour and the Eneco Tour. Specifically the under the seat camera. A small wireless camera placed under a domestique’s saddle and aimed back and slightly up which gives a good view of the one or two riders directly behind and riders diagonally back to either side of the camera bike. It also give a really good idea of just how tight the bunch is in the peloton sometimes. I’m hoping they have one of those camera’s tagged on Petacchi’s lead out man. Watching the Milram milk men run out a great lead and Petacchi being delivered from both the normal view and the view from the lead out man’s seat would be something I would really like to see.
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