Skip this if you don’t like cycling

This year’s Tour de France has been possibly the weirdest in the history of the event.  Ignoring all of the doping issues that resulted in the top five riders being denied entry, there’s been a very unorthodox feel to the race.  It has been kinda like schoolboy football, no-one either wants to or knows how to defend.  It started off with a sprinter winning the prologue which was pretty unusual in itself.  The jersey then changed hands several times before the favourites took over when it hit the Pyrenees.  Landis took control of GC but then subsequently announced it wasn’t up to him to defend it.  Oscar Pereiro, a top 10 GC rider, lost 30 mins over these mountain stages, but was then bizarrely handed these 30 minutes back and became the new leader when the peleton didn’t bother chasing his breakaway a few days later.  Landis then completely folded and lost 8 minutes on GC in the 16th stage, and was seemingly out of contention.  The peleton then let him ride away and claim most of that back the next day, with CSC, T-Mobile and none of the other teams prepared to chase him down.  Pereiro knew that he and everyone else was losing the tour and asked CSC and T-Mobile to help chase down Landis, but they refused.  Landis should now win the ITT and the tour as a result, with only Klöden and Evans being able to stop him.

For once it seems the strongest rider will win, as opposed to the rider with the best team.  Riders take the lead, and then give it away as their team is unable to defend.  If USPS/Discovery defended like T-Mobile/CSC/Phonak have this year then Lance wouldn’t have won a single tour.  If Vino had been racing, he’d have destroyed the peleton on his own this year.