Well no doubt about it..this is one colourful TdF. After all the rider antics in the some of the first stages, things looked to be back to just hardnose bike racing.
My opinion is that its been great racing since the finish line crawl of last week. Its kinda like the riders had a good talking to and off they went the next day on the cobbled stage, racing extremely well..and seem to have ever since. I thought the upper portions of yesterday’s descent into Gap looked pretty frightening, especially the areas where there was no guard rail. Good riding as no one seemed to come acropper. Il Cavallino is back to being the fastest galloper in the group BUT, what will happen now that his last hit of nitrous in the form of Mark ‘The Butter” Renshaw, got the boot? Il treno del Marco is missing a locomotive which is going to make the aging Ale-Jet a hard man to catch in the points cat.
Actually I think its great that Sig Petacchi had made it over the big hills intact. Truly, people say that these sprinters can’t climb, and well this is true in comparison to the ‘real’ climbers of the world, but those hills are nuts. The average local Cat 1 or 2 racer would freak on them let alone all these weekend warrior types that fancy themselves as ‘bike riders’. Triathletes???…no chance. Don’t underestimate how well even the pure sprinter types can elevate themselves.
Hills to a Euro pro are a lot different than what North American riders generally regard as climbs. Some years ago a group of us were the 100 mile lap of what is used in the Penticton Iron-Man course. This loop takes in the ascent of Richter Pass which makes many a trialthoner tremble but really isn’t much of a bump. Within our little peleton was Canadian ex pro Steve Bauer and as we were nearing the latter parts of the ride, I asked him he thought this would make a pretty decent race course. His reply was simply,”Yeh not bad, but pretty flat though”. Likely you’d never lose the sprinters.
On the other end, the guys that you see climbing at the front are incredible. Its freaky how fast they can go uphill. There’s a local hill in my area that runs up Cypress Mountain (the infamous no-snow hill for the snowboard events at our recent Olys) and its a ride that everyone seems to do just because. Many moons ago (like 30 years) I could manage a plus or minus 29 minute run on my old Cinelli. Keeping mind that I was actually a pretty good climber (at a local level) and got most of most decent results in hilly races, you can imagine how much faster it really was when one Vancouver’s best ever riders, Brian Walton smoked off a mid 25 minute effort. Brian was absolutely no slouch. He got a contract with Motorola and was off to Europe. We heard he’d won the GP Eddy Merckx and had some other reasonable race placings as well. When he returned I asked how the climbing was over there thinking he must have been right at the sharp end. His retort was to the effect there’s no way he could keep up with the real climbers and figured they’d be doing a 21 minute ride up this Cypress hill thing. Makes you want to sell your bike huh?
So anyway, when you see those hilly stages on the telly, have as much respect for those ‘can’t climb’ sprinters as you do for the climbers. I actually don’t know which ones are braver.