Being Australian, what I’m about to say might come across as unpatriotic, but I don’t rate Evans highly at all. He’s never once impressed me as a top teir road cyclist. Great Mountain Biker - no doubts about it - but I’m old enough to remember Phil Anderson mixing it up, punch for punch with Hinault, Fignon, Le Mond, and Kelly - and let me tell ya - that was some serious mother fucking racing. Those guys used to mix it up over the whole season - from the early Spring Classics all the way through the Grand Tours through to the World Championships.
My point is this - when you’re carrying “Number One” on your jersey and bike, there’s an incumbent responsibility to ride like you own it - not just follow wheels anonymously in the pack, hoping not to crack when it really counts. In my opinion, if you win a Grand Tour with only 1 stage win, it’s a pretty piss weak victory. If you win a Grand Tour with zero stage wins, then that’s pathetic - or in the famous words of Laurent Fignon - sans pinache.
If you want to win a Grand Tour, at some point in the race - usually over 3 or 4 stages - you’ve got to come out and play, and I mean really come out and psychologically smash people leaving dead bodies all over the road. Well Cadel Evans isn’t that guy - at best all he can do is follow wheels on the climbs and try not get dropped. I don’t rate him. He can’t smash people and dominate them.
My money’s on Menchov. He’s not a rider for the ages, but he’s got balls at least. And he doesn’t come across like he’s crying all the time.
Heh - a google search for ‘Cadel Evans and wheelsucker’ turns up over 200 hits. He’s getting some stick for his style alright. He hung in there pretty good again today. Tomorrow would be the perfect stage for a championship performance.
Only two hours to the start of the toughest stage I have seen in years. 3 hc peaks. Crazy. I guess everything will fall into place today - it is so easy for any of the favorites to lose 4-5 minutes on a stage like this. I predict a stage win for Sastre, and an off day for Menchov - don’t know about Evans, but as others have said: unless he really attacks today, he doesn’t deserve the Tour. He could surprise me, of course, but with a team as weak as his, I think he’s done.
I didn’t know about this thread. Not sure how I missed it. Anyway, Cadel won’t attack today. No way. He never does. I’m not as negative about him as BBF, but he is not an attacking rider. He doesn’t win he just never loses.
My take on it is that you can break it down into two groups of remaining contenders: the climbers and the TT’ers:
Menchov and Evans. Menchov had a bad day yesterday right when I thought he might take time out of Evans and is now over 1 min back. He has to take serious time out of Evans today, or have the TT of his life to beat him. Menchov may well take time out of Evans today, though, because he seems in better climbing form. Van Velde is arguably still in this group too, although at over three minutes back he’s now a very long shot.
Sastre, Schleck and Kohl: they need to get a good few minutes on Evans today because on past form he will take that out of them in the TT. At the moment they only have seconds (and Sastre is about a minute behind). I think they will take time out of Evans today but how much? They could do it, I just don’t know. I thought they’d take some time out of him yesterday and some today, but they failed yesterday and now they have to kill Evans tonight: it’s a do or die effort.
Down to two, probably. There is always room for a dark horse, or for someone to have an amazing TT beyond past form. But my take on it is:
There are no indications that Menchov can get a minute back on Evans (possible but unlikely) and the other climbers near the top (Kohl and Schleck) won’t stay away from Evans in the TT. So that means an Evans/Sastre battle. On paper, you’d think Evans can beat Sastre by about 1 and a half minutes in the TT, and that is what the gap is.
Awesome stage. (I asked my Boss if I could take the day off to watch it live, and he said yes! He’s a big cycling fan, just like me one could say )
Spoiler box just in case anyone is wanting to catch the highlights without knowing the result:
[spoiler]Heroic performance from Sastre on the Alpe, did you see him have a dig at it early doors and Menchov chase him down? That was just for starters mate, second attack straight away and he left them all for dead. Menchov shelled out the back, did well to steady the ship and bridge back up to the leading group by the end.
Gotta credit the wheelsucker, such a strong rider who refuses to crack. He’s like a fucking limpit. Put a lot of work in on his own in the group, and may have done enough to give him the upper hand following the timetrial. We shall see.
The most impressive guy over the past few days to me is Andy Schleck - the commentator Paul Sherwen reckoned he’s nailed on to win the Tour in the next few years. Just has a serene strength to him on the climbs.[/spoiler]
With all that inspirational Apline scenery, I’m off to ride my bike!
I would imagine that since Evans is at $1.43 and Sastre at $4.30 on Betfair, the professional gamblers think it won’t be close at all. But last year in the last TT Evans beat Sastre by 1:28 so I guess I’d be taking the $4.30 .
As a loyal Aussie I will be cheering for Evans. Everyone else has a team to help them, Evan’s team is very ordinary. Just look at where the CSC guys stand 3 of the top 12. Give Evans the same team and this would all be over already.
No he beat Sastre by 2.33 in the second time trial and 2.47 in the first, both being over about 50+km (ie same as this Saturday). That’s presumably why the odds are as they are. But history shows that yellow jerseys who need to hang on in the TT perform out of their skins. Witness Contador last year.
While I’m the first to whinge about the lack of a team who can keep up to support Evans, name a stage this year where CSC’s team have hurt him (any more than they have hurt themselves)? CSC have done a good job of shaking off the slightly weaker GC contenders by setting a killer pace at times. They’ve hurt Menchov and Van Velde and Cunego. But Evans has just ridden right along with CSC, as if he were one of them. The only stages where Evans has lost time to CSC guys have been due to individual climbing efforts by CSC’s climbers, and he has been right there with CSC at the start of the climb, each time.
Well, look, I’m happy to admit that my last post fell into the department of “who’s the greatest tennis player of all time?” - that is, it’s an opinion about other opinions and as such, it didn’t count for much. All I’m saying is that a Grand Tour winner should be something more than just a strong TT rider who takes the leader’s jersey in a solo race against the clock.
The other day, I heard Evans defending his riding style. Silly boy… he compared himself to Miguel Indurain as a form of defense. News Flash Cadel: Big Mig won a Giro and 3 Vueltas as well as 5 TdF’s - and he finished 2nd in the World Championships 3 times. Most importantly, Big Mig won mountain stages by dropping everyone else, not just Time Trials. Just look at 1990.
As a younger man, I recall racing a lot through Europe. I rode for a really hot team out of Paris in 1987. Amateur of course, but quasi professional in the way that Rugby was quasi professional back then. Anyways, I can remember being inthe zone some days, and just arrogantly looking back over my shoulder on climbs, taunting some of the guys. It was 50/50 - I’d get my ass smacked or I’d do the smashing. But that was the thrill. Making a contribution… putting your balls on the line and backing yourself…
I look at a guy like Evans and if he wins anything, he basically wins because somebody else loses their lead. I rarely seem him contribute anything however… and eh… like I said… who’s the greatest tennis player of all time?
I will defer to those who know more, like Boo Boo Foo but I must be misunderstanding team riding. I thought the fact that Evans is constricted to tagging on to CSC and had to drag the field up to Sastre without anyone helping him was an admirable achievement. The way I see it if Evans had a team as good as CSC, they would have been up front and helped him chase down the gap.
What else could he have done, unaided, in the circumstances?
Evans has no discernible personality don’t ask, in fact he comes across as a whining wee bollox who looks like Gollum, fresh from Le Tour de Mordor. Throw in a very passive racing style and you’ve got a guy it’s difficult to cheer for.
His performance yesterday was outstanding I thought, esp given his lack of team support which was critical on the final climb. Did you see how the Schleck brothers varied the pace up L’Alpe with mini-attacks? That puts brutal mental and physical strain on Cadel as he has to chase them down and ride at a very stop start cadence, at the end of a hellish stage. If he had 1 or 2 other strong teammates there it would have been a different story.
It’s very early to be talking about the all new ‘cleaner’ Tour (touch wood), but the days of guys just showing their arse and riding straight off the front may be over, or at least very much constrained. I think fans of Le Tour have to appreciate that dope-free cycling is not just a slogan, it will fundamentally change how people ride and how Le Tour is won. I wonder if Cadel is a sign of the new breed.
When you are going up something as steep as the Alpe the speed is too low for drafting to make much real difference. So your team mates can’t help you much.
Evans just couldn’t go up the Alpe as fast as Sastre. Period. For all the talk about CSC’s team effort, in the end all Sastre’s team did was get him to the bottom of the Alpe and then he did the rest on his own. He didn’t have any teammates helping him, you’ll notice.
Exactly. And all that Evans did was gamble that Frank Schleck would chase his own teammate because he’d rather not lose the Yellow Jersey himself. But that’s not how Bjarne Riis works. Team CSC is more important than the individual team members, and I can guarantee you that both Schleck brothers were hearing a veritible gob ful of radio chatter from big Bjarne as they were going up the climb - telling them precisely how to headfuck Evans and then, when it became obvious that Carlos Sastre was going to take the lead, to deliberately become a handbrake on Evans over the last 4 kilometers.
I was laughing my head off when Evans let Sastre go. When it became clear that Evans was going to mark Frank Schleck at all costs I laughed my head off. I was screaming at the TV… “Dude, you are so marking the wrong guy! Can’t you see what Bjarne Riis has planned today? Your Tour de France win is riding off up the road dude! You better chase him now you chicken…”
Another possibility (particularly given Evans experience last year) is that he just had it worked out in his cool, boring, but ya gotta admit potentially effective head. Last year he tried to go with Rasmussen and Contador on a climb, blew up and lost the tour.
He may have thought “fuck it, I’m not a pure climber. I know I can’t match it with these guys when it comes down to it. I can let Sastre get about a minute, minute and half. It’d be nice not to give him anything, but if I try doing that I may blow up and lose three minutes, and then I’ll really be fucked. So I’m just going to let him go and stick in the little bunch so there’s someone to pace me, maybe work off Kohl and Menchov if I can.”
Or maybe he just got it wrong. But it’s hard to believe that Evans’ manager wasn’t also in his ear telling him what to do. He must have known that Sastre was gaining a lot on him. I was screaming at the TV too, telling him he just had to go but looking at it more calmly, I’m not sure he didn’t do the right thing.
And to expand on that, I remember last year after Evans did try to go with the pure climbers and blow up, there was more than one commentator saying
*“I hate to kick the guy when he’s down, benefit of hindsight, great shame blah blah blah, but really he should have just accepted that he couldn’t keep up with the pure climbers, calmed down, found his own rhythm and limited his time loss, inexperience, bad decision, tactical error etc…” *
Well, I think about the two guys in the last 20 years who really exemplified that situation - and they were Big Mig and Jan Ulrich. Both of 'em were big gear merchants on climbs - and they were heavy too. Clearly they weren’t pure climbers. So what they did was ride at the front at the fastest possible pace they could maintain and they ignored the surges. And THAT is the difference. Evans lacks the guts to do that. It’s in his head. As soon as Sastre went, that should have been his tactic. He should have gone purely into time trial mode up the climb instead of following Frank Schleck and letting CSC and Valverde dictate proceedings.
But it’s just not in his nature to back himself. I love a rider who’s prepared to back himself - even if he blows up later. For crying out loud though - Evans was so scared to give it a go that he let Menchov get back on after he blew up and left bits of spleen and pancreas all over the road. That’s just inexcusable.
I tend to agree. People talk about him being brutally subjected to attacks etc but he just didn’t need to cover them all. Andy Schleck? Nine minutes back, who cares? And once Sastre had more than 47 seconds on Evans, Frank Schleck and Kohl were irrelevant. Limiting time on Sastre was all that mattered.
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