Tour de France, Stage 12 – Cruel and Unusual?

Once in awhile you look at some of these stages in the Tour de France and you can’t help but wonder if some of the organizers involved in picking the route have a mean streak.  Take today’s 12th stage for instance, which traveled 210.5 kilometers (130+ miles) from Bourg-de-Péage to Mende.  Though not even categorized a full-on mountain stage it had 5 categorized climbs; two cat 3’s at the start, a long grinding cat 2 in the middle, another cat 3 a bit later, and then a cat 2 to top it all off.  If one simply called this stage what it was – punishment – then this final bit would fit well into most people’s definition of cruel and unusual!

Now of course everyone fears the big HC (off-category) mountains and rightly so.  These nasty peaks are still up the road and we’ll see them on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday next week in the Pyrénées as the race starts to skirt the Spanish border in the south of France.  Can’t wait!  These climbs strike fear in the hearts of climbers and non-climbers alike and deserve serious physical and mental preparation (and considerable TV viewing time!).

For world-class elite road racers though, cat 3’s and 2’s are often just kind of bumps in the road.  But if you watched any of the riders struggling over that last climb today, now called the Montée Laurent Jalabert after the French cyclist who won climbing it in 1995 on Bastille day, you saw abject pain and suffering!   The darn thing was less than 4 kilometers long and it flattened out at the top.  Doesn’t look too bad on paper.   Only problem is, the riders had to pedal over 200 kilometers in 30+ degree heat (90 Fahrenheit) just to get there, for the pleasure of pedaling something akin to vertical to the finish line.  There were several sections with a 12-14% tilt and then one nearing 16%!   The crazy guy that dresses up like the devil all the time was seen outrunning some of the bikers during that stretch – and that guy’s not a young man!

It just shows how challenging you have to make various stages to truly test these amazing athlete’s stamina and endurance, otherwise, you’d simply have a crazy bunch sprint at the end of every day.  Well, there was no bunch sprint today.

The stage started out with many predicting that a breakaway would have a very good chance of succeeding.  If it contained riders that didn’t pose any threat to the main GC contenders, the big teams would likely tolerate them.  Trouble is, no one considered the 4 riders that broke forward with about 47 kilometers to go, nonthreatening. Team RadioShack’s Andreas Klöden, Astana’s Alexander Vinokourov, Garmin-Transitions Ryder Hesjedal, and Caisse d’Epargne’s Vasil Kiryienka were the 4 surging forward and the GC contenders in the main peloton did not like the looks of that one bit.  It put pressure on everyone to speed up and take back some time on these four before that last thigh-zapping climb.  And when the peloton works together, wow, can they snatch back time!

Within 10 kms they’d eaten a full minute out of the break.  In another 10 kms or so, they’d done it again, chewing up another minute or so, even though the break was working really well together.  The relentless juggernaut of the pack being propelled by the teams that were afraid of losing their current GC placements.  By the time they’d gotten to the foot of the – what to call it – Jalabert (?), it looked as if the fresher legs of the pack were going to take the stage from the hard fought break.  That would be the case, but not before some fireworks between the top two contenders.

Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck seemed content to simply track each other’s movements till now, and had the pack not gotten a whiff of potential victory they may have finished with the same time.  But getting close to the break, Alberto must have felt pretty good and decided to attack.  Low and behold, in a complete reversal of stage 8, it was Andy that was unable to respond this time and Alberto was able to put 10 seconds on him by finish.  Is the strain of the maillot jaune starting to weigh Andy down?

Andreas Klöden was right in it only 5 seconds back from Schleck and Levi Leipheimer’s never-say-die-attitude is keeping him in the hunt, finishing just a few riders back of Klöden and as of tonight still in 6th place in the general classification.  Everyone else on the team is still healthy and pedaling and hopefully saving as much energy as possible for the cruel and unusually steep Pyrénées to come.  Lance Armstrong still looks very good and while he’s devoted to helping Levi get on that podium in Paris, he also knows this is his last Tour de France.  Look for something interesting to happen as El Patron performing his support duties also looks for the opportunity to have some fun and air it out.

Finishing with the cruel and the unusual, often cruel incidents cause injuries that you simply can’t pedal through and that appeared to be the case with Garmin-Transition’s announcement today that Tyler Farrar would be abandoning.  Tough call for sure, must be hurt worse than realized.  On the unusual side, many thought it a bit harsh that race management rather quickly concluded that yesterday’s dust-up at the line involving Mark Renshaw, Julien Dean, and Tyler Farrar was all Mark’s fault and intentional to boot, so they not only disqualified him, they send him home.  These two events are going to really open up the sprinter’s finishes and there should be some unpredictable pyrotechnics in the days to come.

By George Hurst, staff writer