Final Week

I’d caught Sunday’s stage in a variety of ways – family weekend – using the cyclingnews feed, speeding through the SBS replay offered on NBC Gold online and, after getting home last night, in watching the NBC coverage I realized I’d missed some important moments of the race.

First off, the Movistar were absolutely wonderful and one can only applaud their attacking attitude. They don’t, unfortunately, seem to have a cohesive nor clearly defined strategy for this race, Quintana clearly only concerned with himself for the moment and Valverde, who surpassed himself in the Pyrenees, must be wondering if his early decision to become a worker bee, a super elite one just the same, was the right one. At 39-years old, he’s never looked better. Mikel Landa, who, without the two-minutes lost because of his crash on that now infamous stage to Albi, would still be in 7th overall, but that much closer to the podium and, as we saw on Sunday, his form seems to be growing as we approach the Alps. The Movistar are a stage race team, pure and simple. They collectively possess an enormous, accumulated depth of experience gained over long, hard kilometers, all which adds up to consistency and third-week strength. We’ll keep hearing from them.

Groupama-FDJ was even better than I’d first thought on Sunday because I’d missed 22-year old David Gaudu’s second day of grace in the mountains. The young Breton, clearly Thibaut Pino’s crunch-time man of choice, lay down an infernal rhythm on the final climb, suffocating the opposition which gave Pino the opening for the powerful attack that moved him up in the standings. Gaudu is young, it would be normal for him to fade this week, but who knows, he keeps surprising.

Julian Alaphilippe’s emotions and lack of experience got the better of him on Sunday. He should have continued to play the national unity game, leaving Pino to go on the final climb with the confidence that with more than two-minutes in hand in the Yellow Jersey fight, he could play the psychological game from behind of daring Thomas and Kruijswijk to chase or lose their positions on the GC. Instead, clearly suffering, he went with Pino, blew up – and ok, this is understandable – but then, when caught by the Thomas group, stayed on the front and pulled himself into exhaustion which they all gleefully took advantage of by attacking hard at the end, taking 27” out of his lead. Everything in this Tour revolves around Geraint Thomas. He’s the Yellow Jersey, whether it’s on his shoulders or not and Alaphilippe should have raced with that in mind. This week will be telling for Alaphilippe. He’s been racing in the same manner as Simon Yates at the 2017 Giro d’Italia, holding the leader’s jersey but chasing everything that moves like a mad dog. Yates’s spectacular collapse in that race, under pressure of Mr. Chris Froome, should have served as a warning to the Frenchman and we will see this week if he can pull himself back together – he’s running on fumes – and race in front to Paris. If not, adapting a stage chaser attitude as Simon Yates has, with his two stage wins this Tour so far, is not the worst way to handle the rest of his career. 

Steven Kruiswijk, the most boring racer in the peloton, he suffers in Holland from the all of the media attention lavished on Tom Dumoulin and remains somewhat anonymous, is a paragon of consistency. Don’t forget that he was on the way to win the 2016 Giro when he crashed, hard, into a snow bank on a descent and lost the race finishing 4th to his crushing disappointment. He was 5th in the Tour and 4th in the Vuelta last year and has six more top-ten placing in major stage races. Kruiswijk can hardly wait for the Alps and wants the hardest, deepest race possible. 

There are many more stories to follow, the Germans Emanuel Buchmann and young Lennard Kämna will be interesting, as will Rigoberto Uran and Richie Porte, both looking to save their Tours.

Today is, in theory, a recuperative one – as much as a Tour stage can be – through a region of ancient civilization dotted with Roman architecture and still-standing works. However, the peloton will be on guard: the area is windy and with the favorites all clustered within 2’ 14” of one another, and as we saw to the stage to Albi, two-minutes are quickly lost when you least expect it.