Boo Boo Foo is more qualified to anwer than I am, but it is my understanding that they may run a different set of gears in the mountains (lower) than they would on the flats. However they do not run a gear anywhere near as low as say your average mountain bike. :eek:
These guys are monsters, every single one of them.
In the Tour de France, few climbs are so serious that a 39/23 won’t surfice. That is, a 39 tooth front chain ring followed by a 23 tooth sprocket on your rear cluster. There ARE one or two climbs in Spain and Italy which nudge 20+% gradiants, and the boys use up to 27 tooth rear sprockets for those climbs I’m told.
Nowadays, almost every team rides a 10 speed rear cluster. (And the sprockets are REALLY close together in distance, requiring very narrow chains which actually wear out faster than ever before - but hey, a new chain doesn’t cost that much.)
Most pros are doing 25,000+ km per year - that’s an average of 500km per week, which isn’t that hard to do when all you’re paid to do in life is clock up the miles if you’re not racing. One of the unexpected benefits though is you get really, REALLY lean. Your body fat levels drop to a point where you look like you’ve been in a concentration camp - at least, in your face that is. But unlike the poor survivors of those terrible places, pro cyclists look insanely healthy - and often they have the most remarkable musculatures with amazing veins showing up all over the place.
And oddly, that’s actually a look you like to aim for as a cyclist. The signal you’re trying to send to your fellow competitors is “Look out boys… I’m this lean because I’ve been doin’ the miles - shitloads of 'em - and I’m flying and you’re NOT!” It’s a look very similar to being a champion race horse in some respects.
The benefit to being so lean, of course, is that you’re carrying absolutely not one single more kilo of weight up a climb than you have to. And that is REALLY important. Every single undulation you ride over in a race - whether it be a small hill in a club race, or a 2,400m HC Alp - well, they all use up a definable amount of your glycogen stores and they deposit lactate in your legs as a thank you gift. As a typical Mountain Stage in the Tour de France progresses, those lactate levels build up to excruciating amounts of pain, which in turn slow your climbing ability. Hence, it’s a simple rule of physics that every single kilo less you carry up a climb results in less lactate, and a greater power to weight ratio (ergo speed).
When you consider that some amateur club racing folks will gladly spend over $7,000+ US Dollars to buy a bike which is 1 kg lighter than some other bike, you can see now why losing body fat is such an incredibly “bang for buck” thing to do.
Now I can’t stress this highly enough when I say this… unless you’ve been there, and unless you’ve done it, you can’t imagine how insanely painful it is to race a mountain stage on the limit of your horsepower. Imagine trying to run up the Empire State building, at full pace, up the stairwell, carrying a sack of concrete powder. Imagine how incredibly high your heart rate would be, and how much air you’d be puffing, and the incalculable pain in your legs? Imagine trying to keep up with the leaders, and they’re pulling away and you’re having to dip into oxygen debt to keep up with them, and you can literally feel a heart attack coming on? Now imagine doing that for 25 minutes flat out, over 4 separate Empire State buildings with a mad sprint between buildings to the next stairwell? THAT, is a typical stage in the Mountains of the Tour de France.
It’s generally accepted that pro cyclists are the leanest athletes in sport (on average, that is). They’re even slightly leaner than Kenyan marathon specialists if you can believe such a thing, but they have way bigger musculature - especially if they’re a sprinter or a rolleur. Obviously, there are athletes in Olympic events who also get down to 4% body fat, but overall, pro cyclists are universally the lowest body fat percentages of all sports. Followed by Olympic cross country skiiers, believe it or not!
I knew there was some reason I wasn’t a competitive cyclist.
So, it must feel pretty good when you stop doing it, eh?
Yeah, but what if you ate 9,200 calories a day during the Tour? Doesn’t take long for things to add up. That ninth bagel will get ya!
Well, as an amateur in the annual Peace Race I recall eating at least 4 full plates of pasta meals per day - not to mention the countless muesli bars etc during the stage and bacon and eggs for breakfast etc. And we’d still lose weight.
The Peace Race was a Soviet race over 2 weeks with average stage lengths between 140 - 180km per day. The occasional 200km stage would happen too. Still, nowhere near the stages which are ridden in any of the Grand Tours.
And that 9,200 calories you mentioned is only the 7 hours in the saddle. Add on another 2,500 calories for the other 17 hours in the day which just represents life itself, and now you’re really getting a handle on how much food they have to eat.
Indeed, the single greatest challenge in a Grand Tour is getting your diet right so that you can time your “movements” right (if you know what I mean). Nothing worse than a forced nature break during a stage. The Tour stops for NO-ONE! Those sorts of things are planned to the most minute degree nowadays. Apparently, on the rail transfers between stages, it’s quite common for the toilet reservoirs to get quite full I’ve heard.
You wouldn’t need 40,000 gears. You’d just need ONE gear. A really low one.
On gearing: like Boo Boo Foo said, they run 10-gear clusters in the back, and 2 rings in the front giving them 20 gears, but you don’t usually use the big-big or the small-small, so maybe more like 18 gears.
The gears in the back for a “typical” stage will probably have teeth numbering
11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-21
For a Mountain stage, maybe
11-12-13-14-15-16-17-19-21-23 or even 12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-23-25.
On the front, they probably use a 39 tooth and a 53 tooth ring, but during the Team Trial Trial, I heard an announcer say someone was using a 55 tooth ring. Ullrich is know for trying to muscle a big gear around slowly (a “masher”, we say) whereas Lance is more of a higher-cadence, smaller gear climber (a “spinner”).
I’m an all right climber. . .I did a Mountain Time Trial this year that had an 18% pitch (for a short stretch) and my lowest gear was a 39/25.
The toughness of the climbs can’t be overstated, but a lot of amateur riders could get up them. The big time trial stage last year was up L’Alpe D’Huez. I heard Lance brought Cheryl Crow on it and she did it in like 1:15. The riders were doing it in about 35 minutes, IIRC.
For these guys, what’s making the climb tough is that you’re racing up it. I was reading about Floyd Landis and his trainer was saying during one of the flat stages, (all numbers are from memory) he averaged 200 watts for the ride. But the trainer said he can average 280 watts on a 6 hour training ride. He was actually COASTING for 16% of the ride. You won’t see anything like that when they hit the hills.
For the last few days, no one is gaining time on anyone else. In the mountains, Lance will put 30 minutes on a guy.
Today’s finish read as pretty exciting, too bad for Mengin losing it in the last 700 meters. I can’t wait to get home and watch the finish of today’s stage. Anybody got any casualty reports from that last crash?
Not hearing that anyone big was hurt.
Sounds like Vino really had the balls to attack hard in inclement conditions when I’m sure Disco was just looking to keep Lance safe. Let’s hope he keeps up the pressure.
It would seem like the 7" that Vinokourov picked up today could be quite helpful down the road. Does he have the power to keep up with Lance over the long haul and make a go at the title?
It’s still anybody’s race except that Disco is showing some pretty strong teamwork so it’ll be hard to break that support and single out Armstrong. I’m not sure that any Disco team member has even been part of a single break away. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) They are all supporting eachother and their team leader. Plus Lance has the momentum and good physical and mental condition working for him and that’s tough to beat.
Watching Discovery work is a bit like watching the Germans play in the world soccer championships. They move like a panzer tank division. Strategy, teamwork and discipline above all else. Not a lot of flare.
Of course the mountain stages may show a different side. I think they’ll start “tearing off their opponent’s legs”.
Vino certainly is a threat, but Ullrich is the team leader, and the main GC contender for T-Mobile until proven otherwise. Vino will work for Ullrich, period, unless Ullrich falls out of consideration.
It was 19" actually. You get a 12" second time bonus for 2nd place in a flat stage, and a 15" time bonus for 1st. The idea is to liven up the flat stages in the event that the leaders board is very close.
Vinokourev proved an age old proverb in cycling today - namely, “Fortune favours the bold…”
When you’re already in Yellow, by the very nature of the race, you’re always on the defensive. Obviously, if you’ve got a great team, that defensiveness is made easier by having other eyes work for you (not to mention radios) but still, to let your closest threat in GC go up the road with just 3km to finish is really embarassing for Team Discovery, and a wonderful, inspirational filip for T-Mobile.
The guys in T-Mobile would be thrilled to know one of their main contenders took time out of Armstrong - and on a flat stage, no less. But what’s really important however is that T-Mobile have got 3 guys that Team CSC and Team Discovery have to watch. In the past 3 years, Andreas Kloden, Jan Ullrich, and Vinokourev have all finished on the podium in Paris - and what that means is that in the mountain stages, each one of those guys can take turns attacking.
Now, I’ve been in races where one team as got three major GC contenders and it’s a total bastard of a race to ride in. (The Polish national team in the 1980’s were effectively a pro cycling team the way they used to ride) and it’s just exhausting having to mark and chase, mark and chase. If T-Mobile get it right, they SHOULD be able to crack Team Discovery and Team CSC by weight of numbers of attacks. In theory, that is. What happens is you send one guy up the road in a break. And your major non-team threats have to chase, and chase hard. Meanwhile, you sit in and get dragged along and when the break gets caught, you send another guy up the road in a break, and you still sit in and get dragged along. And when THAT break gets caught, then YOU attack up the road and your teammates get the easy ride. It’s a system which works if you get it right.
The last time I saw it being done perfectly was in 1996 on the stage into Pamploma where Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich kept taking turns attacking, and they destroyed Indurain that day - just destroyed him.
Actually, that hasn’t been true since at least 1990. 
The Germans just aren’t that good anymore.
That’s true, but I think you can count Klöden out this year. He seems to be in horrible shape, and a lot of German cycling fans are quite angry that he and Tobias Steinhauser were selected for the tour team and Erik Zabel wasn’t. Some of the more die-hard Zabel fans are saying Steinhauser was taken along just so Ullrich can have his new girlfriend (who happens to be Steinhauser’s sister) close by. 
It may be at least that long since last I watched a worldcup soccer game.
The Germans were in the '02 final.
Here’s a new one for me… “Glass Cranking”… 
From the context, I gathered it wasn’t a good thing. But what is it?
WTF?
Where the hell is Discovery? Why is Armstrong defending against 3 T-Mobile riders all by himself?
Today’s stage caused more questions than it answered.
Why in the hell did Hincapie go out on that breakaway early? It makes no sense to me.
Who is that Weening guy? How great was that finish? The TDF website says that the electronic scoring had Weening winning by 0.0002"
And to echo what QuickSilver said, Where the hell were the D boys? The individual results have them at 41, 47, 48, 68, 74, 75, 77, 81. The nearest D boys were 58 seconds behind Lance. WTF this was a cat 2 climb, not the Alpe d’Huez. Could this have been a strategy move by the D boys? That was my first thought, was that Discovery was trying to fake out the competition like Lance did to Ulrich on the slopes of Alpe d’Huez in 2001. If this is the case, it was a very risky move, ballsy to be sure. But the more I think about it, the less sense that makes. To paraphrase Bob Ucker’s line from Major league It’s obvious they are thinking, I don’t know what they are thinking! The TDF website quotes Lance as saying this about today
INHO either this was a big con on the entire peleton, or the D boys are having some serious discussions right about now.
Anyway here are the GC standing after stage 8. Tomorrow should be a good race.
1 001 ARMSTRONG Lance DSC USA
2 028 VOIGT Jens CSC GER 01' 00"
3 019 VINOKOUROV Alexandre TMO KAZ 01' 02"
4 023 JULICH Bobby CSC USA 01' 07"
5 021 BASSO Ivan CSC ITA 01' 26"
6 011 ULLRICH Jan TMO GER 01' 36"
7 026 SASTRE Carlos CSC ESP 01' 36"
8 004 HINCAPIE George DSC USA 01' 47"
9 014 KLÖDEN Andréas TMO GER 01' 50"
10 066 LANDIS Floyd PHO USA 01' 50"
11 037 KARPETS Vladimir IBA RUS 02' 13"
12 007 POPOVYCH Yaroslav DSC UKR 02' 14"
13 061 BOTERO Santiago PHO COL 02' 18"
14 164 LEIPHEIMER Levi GST USA 02' 31"
Just wanted to pop in and say thanks to you guys who actually know what’s going on. I know just a little, but I’m interested in knowing what’s going on.
N’yah N’yah!