What will happen next?
Floyd Landis has ridden all the GC leaders off his wheel. Essentially he is on a long, lone break away with over 100 very hard kilometers to go over five mountains including two category 1 and one HC. Amazing! The jersey group let him go at great risk… Landis has already “lost it all,” he has nothing to lose and everything to gain in this gutsy move. And for right now it’s a move that’s paying off…Landis, on the road, has pulled back 4′ towards the yellow.
Floyd has cracked on the final climb of the day. Right now he is losing minutes while Levi Leipheimer, Carlos Sastre, Dennis Menchov, Oscar Pereiro and Andréas Klöden are racing on ahead. At this point it looks like Landis may lose as much as 6 minutes putting Oscar Pereiro back in the maillot jaune by over 5 minutes.
Levi Leipheimer and Carlos Sastre now have close to a minute on the GC group while Landis falls further back
Wow! What a shake up! Floyd has fallen clean out of the top 10 for the GC to 11th overall, 08′ 08″ behind Oscar Pereiro’s maillot jaune after losing over 10 minutes for the day. This also makes Levi Leipheimer, still in 9th on the GC, as the best placed American at 07′ 46″ behind. Landis never should have let Pereiro get so much time when they threw the maillot jaune away.
If I had to chose a winner now I’d have to call Sastre as my man. We’ll see what happens though it’s obviously far from over and Pereiro is a good rider, though this year he hasn’t performed that well–until now, and the maillot jaune should be an incredible motivator for him. He definitely rode with hunger and honor for it today!
At the end of each stage, judges award the combativity award to the rider who shows “fighting spirit”. Most often the award goes to the winner of the stage, or the rider who is able to get a breakaway off the front. Today the award went to Stefano Garzelli, who definitely deserved it. On this day though Jens Voigt was the one I would have picked though the examples of fighting spirit were all over the course. Voigt fought all day long, not for himself, but for his team mates, Frank Schleck (who went on to the stage victory) and Carlos Sastra, at 5th in the GC, the highest placed CSC rider in the Tour.
Jens is no run of the mill “domestique”, last year he finished the season in 19th on the UCI Pro rankings, he has worn the maillot jaune twice before and won stages of the Tour among his 40+ career 1st place finishes. Jens is also very well respected by the cyclists of the peloton, recently having been elected by them as their representative to the Cyclistes Professionels Associés (a union for all professional riders of UCI ProTour and UCI Continental Circuit teams).
Jens began the day by setting a long strong tempo in the break away group dropping would be competitors off the back as the group hit the ascents. Even after a crash, Voigt fought back to the group, moved to the front and took a couple strong pulls at the front before finally dropping out the back and leaving Frank Schleck in the excellent care of David Zabriske who continued to set tempo up the mountains.
For many domestiques that would have been job very well done, just manage as you can to the finish, if need be latching on to the “autobus” (the slowest part of the peloton in the mountains)…not for Jens. As he continued on towards the summit of L’Alpe d’Huez the main GC contenders group caught up to him, followed shortly by team mate Carlos Sastre. Instead of letting them pass him by, or maybe latching on to the back of the group, Jens dug deep and helped pace his team mate Carlos Sastre back into contact with the GC leaders Floyd Landis and Andreas Klöden.
Jens ended the stage finishing in 64th place, 13′ 52″ behind stage winner and team mate Frank Schleck, and 12′ 17″ behind Sastre who minimized his losses to 25″ and closed in on a podium placing, moving into 5th overall with only 15″ seperating him from 3rd place and a podium placing. While Schleck and Sastre are largely responsible for thier great performances today, Jens Voigt (and David Zabriske) are also a large part of that success.
I stumbled across an amazing photo from the 2003 Tour de France at Chain Reaction Bicycles that in many ways and on many levels touched me deeply…and made me think about Johann and the beginning of a love of cycling in him.
Last year we got Johann his first bike. This year both Tammy and I have taken to riding our bikes more, and now we picked up a used “insta-tandem” so we can go for longer rides as a family this summer and fall. It feels real good too (both cycling as a family and leaving the car behind). The past couple times we have been to the cycling shop was for Johann. First we went to get him his own Camelback Mini-Mule (He kept snagging my CamelBak wearing it all day and drinking it dry), then the insta-tandem.
Two of the young ladies who work there are quite taken with him as he discusses the Tour and his favorite riders with them as well as riding. He declared the other day to one of them that he wanted to grow up to be a scientist and cyclist. Typically they recognize me primarily as his father. When we showed up Saturday morning to pick up some new tubes for my bike (horrible flat Friday on the way home from work). They asked where he was. When I indicated he was in the car (with Tammy) they wanted to say “Hi” to him, so I had to bring him in before I could go. They are conspiring to set him up with a Trek KDR 1000 (or it’s then equivilent) as soon as his legs are long enough.
Todays performance by Levi Leipheimer, while not enough to break him into the top ten, really moved him back into contention for a top ten and possibly even top three finish in the GC.
After a horrible time trial–losing over 6 minutes to the leaders–Levi looked like he was out of the running entirely. Looking at him at the time trial finish line you could tell he wasn’t feeling “on”. We now know he had very bad diarrhea all night before the time trial. I can’t even imagine riding my commute after a night of diarrhea let alone a Tour time trial.
Today he erased the 6 minute deficit against most of the GC competitors, climbing 45 positions in the general classification–from 58th to 13th! He is now only 5″38′ behind Floyd Landis. I doubt he will catch Floyd, but if Levi is able to perform strongly in the Alps he could still make a podium finish in Paris.
One has to wonder where he would be placed if he had not been sick before the time trial.
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