Tour de France: What a weekend

Posted by Mark on July 23, 2007 under opinion | Be the First to Comment

Crikey, what an awesome weekend!

Vino’s stunning time trial, followed by the brilliant action on the Plateau de Beille.

After my last post it’ll come as no surprise that I was glad to see Evans cracked. He never makes any effort to lead up the climbs, let alone do something as brave as make a break himself. Watching Rasmussen, Leipheimer, Contador and mostly Soler wear him out was justice if you ask me.

Interesting comments by Contador at the end, saying Rasmussen broke an agreement they had about working together to rule out Evans. Contador claimed Rasmussen attacked him, after they’d agreed to work together. Of course, we’ll never know what the exact words were that were exchanged between them, but from my [TV] spectators point of view it looked awfully like Contador got bored of leading Rasmussen and complained. At which point Rasmussen then took the lead. After that they seen to be squabbling over taking the lead. Odd.

Oh well, it worked. Contador up to second, Evans in third three minutes off the lead.

In the ITT on Saturday Contador only pulled 37 seconds out of Rasmussen. With one ITT left, and a lead of 2 minutes 23 seconds on Contador, does this mean Rasmussen is our 2007 winner? I’d certainly like to see it that way. It was a complete surprise, to me at least, to see Rasmussen take the yellow jersey, and his effort in the ITT on stage 13 was stunning (41 seconds slower than our own Bradley Wiggins, not bad!) compared to his past ITT efforts. His climbing has been fantastic, and his tactics smart and calculated. A worth winner? In my mind, yes. Roll on Paris.