Boone’s Nana

Sean

I am not underestimating the difficulty that Mont Ventoux will pose to the riders. Being the penultimate stage, it will also offer an extra level of motivation to those riders still fighting for final positions. I do think that Andy Schleck looks like he will be very good on that climb, and seems to be the one rider who may be able to ride offensively, instead of defensively. I feel like the rider most apt to fall away may end up being Armstrong, but alot of it depends upon how agressive the other riders are. I think he is strong enough to follow the leaders when they are riding steady, but he is not capable of going after repeated surges. Sastre may be the biggest wild card, while Wiggins is the biggest unknown. As a result, Mont Ventoux may end up with some gaps, but it may not ultimately shuffle things up greatly. As for the stages on Tuesday and Wednesday, I don’t think that Tuesday will be as selective as it might be, simply because attacks may be neutralized with a 30km descent. Wednesday might be the most difficult, with repeated climbs leading up to the finish. It will be a huge opportunity for guys like Sastre, Evans or the Schleck brothers to put Astana in difficulty, even with the time trial the next day. The cumulative effects of Tuesday through Thursday will be key, with Mont Ventoux representing the final selection.

Anyway, friends or not, Hincapie shouldn’t necessarily be expecting gifts from Garmin or Astana–basically, he leapfrogged all of Garmin’s and Astana’s GC riders today, even if he didn’t quite get enough for yellow. His own Columbia-HTC could have delayed the end-of-race pressure a bit as well, possibly netting him that 5 seconds. It also seems that if George really wanted it, he could have been pushing that breakaway group during the last 10k–but much of the time when they were on-camera, I saw him near the back of that group. They were disorganized, nobody was willing or able to make further sacrifices to catch the eventual stagewinner. Hincapie was riding like everyone else in that break, even though he had the most to gain–like he was unwilling to expend energy he might want in the final sprint. If anybody in that group helped his cause, it was Nicolas Roche, who at least pushed them to bring in in the two additional escapees and kept the pace a little higher. So, I too wish Hincapie had gotten the jersey, but instead of crying foul he should perhaps look in the mirror and ask if he had 5 more seconds in him, because I think he did, and I think his team could have slowed the chase a bit more–but they didn’t. And if Garmin pushed it a bit due to team rivalry, as one of Columbia-HTC’s big guns, Hincapie (whether he seems like a nice guy or not) may have helped sow those seeds as well. Some amount of this rivalry is team management-driven though with riders as pawns.

Anyway, if the result had been 50 seconds rather than 5, Big George probably wouldn’t have seemed so frustrated.