Froome vs Contador, and other Tour de France Contenders

During yesterday's  Tour de France coverage I was relieved to hear Matt Rendell talking about the benefits Chris Froome will have received by riding for Bradley Wiggins. I've been saying for ages that the high placings Froome achieved in the 2011 Vuelta and 2012 Tour had almost as much to do with Wiggo's brains as Froome's legs.

I summed up my feelings on Wiggins and Froome's respective skills in this post and while I'll admit that Froome has changed and evolved since then, I still think he owes a lot of that evolution to Wiggo.

The ability to ride a clever, savvy race could be vital in the next three weeks. At present, it looks like Froome has the form of his life, while Contador has shown no form at all this year. You can discuss the possible reasons for his loss of form somewhere else, preferably somewhere with less stringent libel laws. Nevertheless, I wouldn't put it past him to have a resurgence: this is the chap who left the beach to win the 2008 Giro on a week's notice. When his form finally comes in, it comes in fast. If Contador finds his legs, there's much less to separate him from Froome physically, and it could come down to who has the better racing brain.

Once upon a time, the only small weakness Contador ever showed was in his race awareness. An on-form Contador climbs and timetrials like a world beater and occasional poor positioning was the only chink in his armour. He was caught behind a crash at the 2011 Tour and caught out by crosswinds in the 2009 Tour, neither of which should have happened if he'd been thinking about his positioning. (I'll admit, it's not as if being stuck in a distant echelon cost him the race in 2009.)

Froome, similarly, has been prone to misreading races, or just plain not thinking about what he's doing. Prior to 2011 he had a reputation for sitting at the back of groups he should have been at the front of, or for burning energy on fruitless early attacks. Then there's the story from his early days in Kenya, where he supposedly rode 50Km to take part in a 250Km race and wondered why he didn't have enough in the tank to compete. Or that moment in the 2011 Vuelta when the entire peloton was bemused to see him frantically attacking off the front in an attempt to secure the bonification at an intermediate sprint. Unfortunately, the intermediate sprint was a whole kilometre further up the road than Froome had thought.

The fact is, these are two guys who've traditionally let legs, lungs and strong attacking instincts do all the work for them. (As I type this, Chris Froome has just attacked on the descent into Ajaccio on Stage 2!)

If Contador recovered enough form for them to be physically matched, which would have the racing brain to make the difference? Froome has shown a little cunning on a couple of occasions this season, skipping turns and feigning tiredness before attacking his rivals from behind, most notably here at the Tour of Oman. Thing is, it does seem to be his only trick, and he's used it twice this year already.

Contador, on the other hand, spent all of the 2012 Vuelta being unable to beat a rampaging Joaquim Rodriguez on their traditional, late-stage, steep battlegrounds, before doing the unexpected and attacking instead on a medium mountain day, ridiculously early in the stage, when Rodriguez wasn't looking. In the process, he stole the race right out from under a stronger rider. If, and it's a very big if, Contador gets his legs back for this Tour, I reckon he'd be smart enough to nick it off Froome.

I sort of hope it does happen. Don't get me wrong, I've stopped holding a grudge against Froome for last year's "Fwooomie-gate", but that doesn't mean I want to see another Tour in which a dominant rider goes almost unchallenged to the victory.

If I'm entirely honest, I'd really like to see Cadel Evans win it. His transformation from petulant nearly-man to engaging, gutsy and aggressive World Champ and Tour winner has been one of the most enjoyable parts of being a cycling fan in recent years, and I'd love to see him reap further rewards. Similarly, I'd love to see the huge amount of excitement Rodriguez has generated over the last few years actually net him the top step on a grand tour podium for once. Sadly, I don't think it's particularly likely - the Tour gets ridden so much faster and harder than other GTs that riders who've seemed to be defying the aging process in other races can suddenly look old overnight. I fear that Evans and Purito can hope for a podium spot at best.

That means that our best hope for an actual GC battle in this Tour comes from Contador rediscovering his legs and then matching wits with Froome. I hope that happens, and if it does, I'll happily cheer for Froome.

Thoughts On Lance Armstrong and the Reasoned Decision

I started writing this post back when USADA asked for copies of the FDA’s evidence against Lance Armstrong, but scrapped it when the writing became confused. I started it again when Armstrong announced that he wouldn’t contest the USADA decision and was stripped of his Tour results and, again, I abandoned it when I felt that the logic running through the writing had been tortured into an unrecognisable shape. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that a post about twisted logic and ambivalence is probably going to look a little twisted and ambivalent, so here we go, attempt number three. This time, I’m just going to type, non-stop, until I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes I want to tick. If it comes out a little rambling and confused then that’s as fair a reflection of my feelings on the subject as anything else.

I’m not particularly interested in discussing what Armstrong did or didn’t do, as that’s been exhaustively covered just about everywhere else. What always interests me is my own reaction to him. I know, I know, that sounds terribly self-obsessed, but this is a blog, it exists to be a bit self-obsessed.  The thing is, I can’t pretend that my feelings about Armstrong and doping are clear-headed and rational, because they so obviously aren’t. There’s plenty of obfuscatory thinking and hypocrisy in my feelings about the case, but I actually think that’s true of most cycling fans. Not to mention cyclists. Not to mention cycling’s governing body, the race organisers, the sports media and even fans of other sports who don’t give a hoot about cycling other than to point and laugh every time the sport stumbles through another scandal.

To start with, I dislike Lance Armstrong. That’s just so you know where I’m coming from. And I don’t have any faith that his Tour victories were achieved cleanly. My distrust of his wins is slightly older than my dislike of him, but not by much. I think the fact that I decided he was a cheat a good year or so before I decided I disliked him says a lot about my attitude towards doping in cycling.

I’ve wanted him to be taken down a peg or seven for years, but why? It can’t just be because he doped, because there are doped riders I’ve liked and supported. Maybe it’s because he doped to such an extent that his performances were laughable, but then, I’ve defended some pretty ridiculous doped performances in the past: I loved Bjarne Riis’ 1996 victory, my previous benchmark for OTT performances. There have been riders who have doped and I’ve defended their victories on the grounds that, at the time, everyone was doing it, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to use the same defence for Armstrong. Perhaps because he doped at a time when at least some riders were trying to clean up their act? Perhaps because his doping seems to have involved private jets, private dope couriers and resources unavailable to other cheats? Oh, the shame: could it be that I dislike the man because he had an unfair advantage in his pursuit of an unfair advantage over other riders who had an unfair advantage?

Perhaps it’s down to his personality? It’s no surprise to anyone to hear that he was a truculent bully. Still, that’s hardly the only side to his personality: the support he gave his rival, Ivan Basso, when Basso’s mother was suffering from cancer was genuinely moving. He clearly wasn’t all bad. Very few people are. So where does the dislike come from?

I didn’t dislike him when he won his first Tour de France in 1999, and at the time I didn’t have that gut certainty that he’d cheated his way to victory either, although I did have plenty of misgivings about the win. For a lot of people, the suspicion stemmed from the fact that he’d been at death’s door a few years before and was now winning the world’s most physically demanding sporting event. For me, that was barely a distraction. What bothered me was that he was a one-day rider winning a three week tour. That has always smelt rotten to me.

The skills and physical gifts needed to be a classics man, a good one-day rider, aren’t the same as those required to win three week Tours. Occasionally the sheer physical gifts of a GT rider allow them to triumph in a one day race, but it’s not common, and it’s vanishingly rare that one-day specialists triumph in Grand Tours. Yet here was Armstrong, a rider who’d never been thought of as anything but a one-day eventer, winning the Tour.  There was the claim that chemotherapy had caused him to drop a shit-ton of weight, but that’s been contested by riders close to Lance who insist that his racing weight was much the same as ever, or had dropped by little more than a kilo or two, not the game-changing seven or eight kilo figure (almost a bike’s worth of weight) that had sometimes been bandied around. It’s not even as if he matured into a GC contender the way some riders do; he was in his late twenties when the transformation occurred.

Watching Armstrong - who’d won stages and classics and a World Championship but had never shown any skill against the clock or gravity - suddenly annihilating his rivals both in the time trials and again on the mountains rang more alarm bells than the positive test for Corticosteroids that was eventually explained away as a saddle-sore treatment. 

I know it’s daft, but in an age of EPO and HGH it was hard to be overly concerned about a drug I’ve been given for a sore knee. But watching Armstrong out-time-trial time-trial specialists was a bother, and then he went on to out-climb climbers, despite the fact that the skills for those two disciplines are usually as distant from each other as the skills of a one-day rider and the skills of a GC man. Armstrong wasn’t even climbing like a time triallist, using the dogged, measured power-plod that often sees time triallists hold their own on the slopes. He was launching explosive attacks like a pure climber, assisted by low-gear, high-cadence style that made you breathless just watching it. In 1999, it seemed that Armstrong had transcended all the boundaries between the sport’s different disciplines in a way that beggared belief. A few years later, he’d win a sprint at the Tour de Georgia as if trying to reinforce the point.

Despite all of that, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt in 1999. Jan Ullrich and Marco Pantani weren’t racing that year, and Alex Zulle & Abraham Olano had both suffered massive losses in the crash on the tide-soaked Passage Du Gois. Sure, he was winning, but he’d been gifted a race in which several riders far superior to him were absent, and several other strong rivals had been scuppered by seaweed rather than Texan grit. At the time, I kidded myself that no matter how unusual his win looked, it was a fluke. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said he was lucky rather than doped.

Obviously, the next few years would come as quite a shock.

You couldn’t kid yourself in 2000. Ullrich was there, and he wasn’t fat. Well, not by his standards anyway.  Pantani was there and, well, he’d had a bit of a rotten year. Still, he’d been blessed by the Pope, so that must have counted for something, right?

Except it didn’t.  Most people thought Ullrich was the strongest Time Triallist in the sport at the time, and perhaps one of the strongest in history, but it was Armstrong who won the race’s 58Km test. Worse still, he came second on the race’s first mountain stage, more than four minutes ahead of Ullrich. Then there was the Ventoux stage, where he chased Pantani (probably not the cleanest rider himself) all the way up the Giant of Provence, covered every move he made, then gifted the stage win to the greatest climber most of us have ever seen. Gifted it!

At the same time that he began to stretch credibility to breaking point, we also got the first hints that he had a shitty character as well. He’d bullied Christopher Bassons the year before, but that had gone largely unreported and unseen. You couldn’t miss the blow up with Pantani though. It’s been shamefully glossed over, but as I recall it, Armstrong spent the press conference following the Ventoux stage all but screaming “It was a gift, I gave it to him” in the graceless manner of someone who had belatedly realised that he’d given away a stage win on hallowed ground and wished he hadn’t.  When Pantani pointed out that such posturing was undignified, Lance proved just how undignified he could be, calling Pantani  “Elephantino” in reference to his prominent ears, and describing him as a “little shit starter”.

Two days of on-road debate and finger-wagging followed, before Pantani went on a suicidal all-day mountain attack, giving Lance his only scare of the race, and then quitting the Tour. Within a couple of years, he’d have had his ears pinned back. In 2004, he overdosed in a hotel room. Neither of those things had anything to do with Lance, but even now I have a hard time not choking up when I think about how much joy I got from watching Pantani, and how sad his life became.

There was precious little joy in watching Armstrong. With the exception of the tremendously exciting 2003 Tour, Lance’s victories were dull. His 2001 victory was man against boy, as he beat Ullrich by nearly seven minutes, gave him ‘the look’, and won two individual time trials and two mountain stages. In 2002 he barely bothered to race - he sat there until the first mountain stage, then allowed his superior teammate Roberto Heras to tow him into an unassailable lead on the very first mountain stage. Oh for a bit of internecine treachery! 2004 was so dull even L’Equipe was speculating about the 2005 event before the first week was over, and as for 2005 … well, catching and passing Jan Ullrich within 14Km of the first stage of the 3,592Km race made for a pretty tedious three weeks.

Armstrong continued to throw his weight around in those years as well. There was the “No French” furore, the chase, catch and saliva shower suffered by Fillipo Simeoni for having had the temerity to testify against Michele Ferrari (Armstrong called it protecting the sport; I think the rest of us would describe it as bullying at best, witness tampering at worst). There were the “It’s Lance, you won’t need your notepad” Sunday afternoon phonecalls to the homes of journalists who’d criticised him, and in later years, the snide tweets about Alberto Contador.

So, he was a shitty personality whose performances defied credibility, but he isn’t the first shitty sportsman, and he won’t be the last cheat, so why do I dislike him more than any of the others? Why do Ullrich, Zulle, Pantani et al get my forgiveness for their cheating, while I’m happy to see Armstrong nailed to the wall?

Perhaps it’s because his cheating seemed so egregious. Plenty of riders have cheated their way to a Tour win, but to seven? In a row? With a career total of 25 Tour De France stage victories in all, including six in a single Tour? There’s cheating and then there’s cheating. It prompts the American quip - don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining. It was insulting. But then … Bjarne Riis. His 1996 victory was pretty shameless as well, yet I rhapsodised about it here.

A bit of disturbing food for thought as well … why am I bothered by the appearance of cheating more than I am by proof of it? Why will I forgive confessed dopers like David Millar while continuing to rail against riders who haven’t technically been caught doing anything but just look too good to be true? Is it that a rider who has been busted can be treated as proof that we’re cleaning up cycling, while riders who consistently put in ridiculous performances without getting caught make it clear that we’re not? Am I guilty, in essence, of wanting the sport to look clean whilst not really caring if it actually is? Or worse, am I quietly doing what I loathe in everyone else, and assuming that any winning performance is also a shady one?

Maybe it’s an anti-American thing. Sorry, I know how iffy that sounds, but I’m trying to be honest here. As a left-leaning, Chomsky-reading, pro-Palestinian liberal who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s barely been a moment in the last ten years when I’ve been able to watch the international news without a grouchy, perpetually-teenaged part of me feeling like the Yanks are the bad guys. Maybe that has poisoned my view of international sports as well? Greg LeMond’s victories in ‘89 and ‘90 were brilliant (I didn’t see his ‘86 win) but for me, cycling is a quintessentially European sport. Its headquarters are in Switzerland, its official language is French, and it’s littered with terms like “tete de la course” and “lanterne rouge”.  Maybe I’m bitter because cycling lost a little of its je ne sais quoi  when its races adopted English as their second language, American voices filled the roadside crowds and a bloke with a comicbook name became the sport’s biggest star.

If that’s the case, I really am a huge hypocrite. I remember when Lennox Lewis was Heavyweight Champion and numerous Americans, including no less a figure than the late Bert Sugar, would exhort each successive American challenger to bring the belts “back where they belong”.  It used to drive me up the wall. If you want to have a global sport, you can’t treat the victories of other nations as if they're some sort of aberration to be rectified. It’s offensive, it demeans other people’s efforts and it cheapens your own victories. If I’m guilty of treating cycling the way that the Americans used to treat boxing, I’d be particularly ashamed of myself. But … but I loved LeMond’s victories. To this day I cheer for George Hincapie. I was in awe of Tyler Hamilton’s broken collarbone rides in the Giro and the Tour, and rooted for Bobby Julich in 1998. I just don’t think my dislike of Lance can be blamed on anti-Americanism.


Maybe it’s because Lance has behaved like a nasty piece of work so often and so publicly? Certainly, I loathe Floyd Landis for the way his defence team treated Greg Lemond. I tend to think that if you surround yourself with people who would stoop that low, you’re probably pretty vile yourself. If you don’t know what I mean, Google “Will Geoghegan” because I’m not going to repeat the story here. I can think of footballers, boxers and athletes I’ve disliked because of their behaviour, without any hint of shady tactics. Taking against Armstrong’s personality is as good an explanation as any I can come up with for why I dislike him so much more than other dope cheats.

The funny thing is, after all these years of wanting him to get his comeuppance, now that it has finally happened, I almost wish it hadn’t. Not for Armstrong’s sake, but because the last of his Tour wins was nearly a decade ago. In the intervening years, the sport really does seem to have taken great strides in cleaning up its act. I’ve followed cycling for too long to ever feel comfortable making a definitive statement about a rider’s cleanliness, but I’d give Carlos Sastre the benefit of the doubt, and I’m as close to certain as I can be that Cadel Evans and Bradley Wiggins are clean. Ryder Hesjedal’s Giro? Clean. Vincenzo Nibali’s Vuelta win? Clean. David Moncoutie’s four Vuelta mountains jerseys? Clean.

You can see the change in riding as well. Multi-mountain breakaways have become a suicidal dice roll rather than a normal tactic, one that riders will pay for whether they seize the race lead or not. Late Km attacks, defensive riding and bonus chasing (the purest form of marginal gain there is) are the new race-winning tactics, rather than the Hautacams and Luz Ardidens of the bad old days.

The fact that the Armstrong decision has taken over the headlines means that doping stories from the dark days of the ‘90s and early ‘00s are more prominent in people’s minds than the steps the sport has taken to clean itself up. Once again, cycling is the whipping boy of sports.

This always gets my goat. FIFA carry out roughly one-sixth as many dope tests in a year as the UCI. When Spanish Police busted Eufemiano Fuentes as part of Operacion Puerto, he made it clear that he’d worked with tennis players, athletes and footballers, yet Puerto was treated as cycling’s scandal. In football, we’ve got  a selection of racists, thugs and airgun wielding idiots shooting the work-experience kids. In boxing we’ve got steroids, the man in the hat nobbling judges, and blocks of plaster of Paris in the handwraps. Formula 1 teams sell trade secrets while taking races to repressive regimes. Yet it's always cycling that's seen as the sewer of sports. Cycling is the joke. Cycling is the whipping boy. 

I wish Armstrong had never cheated to win his races. I wish he hadn’t treated those who tried to tell the truth with such cruelty, and I wish he hadn’t shown such contempt for his rivals. But I don’t think his crimes somehow make cycling worse than any other sport. I don’t think cycling is dirty and other sports are clean, but thanks to Armstrong’s prominence, it’s cycling that has the grubby reputation.

Maybe that’s why I dislike him so much.

Cavendish and Wiggins: The Simple Solution

In Dave Brailsford's recent Radio 5 interview he suggested that the key to defending the Green Jersey won by Mark Cavendish last year whilst simultaneously pursuing the Yellow Jersey for Bradley Wiggins would be in packing the team out with super-strong domestiques. Marvellous. Glad he thought of that. So simple.

We all know it won't be that easy. The last team to successfully pursue yellow and green was Deutsche Telekom, who managed the feat in 1996 and 1997, with Erik Zabel taking the first two of his six Green Jerseys, while Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich both captured their sole Yellow Jerseys. Deutsche Telekom could draw on an admirable selection of super super tough domestiques, including Rolf Aldag, Brian Holm and Udo Bolts.

Cavendish knows Aldag, Holm and Zabel well, having worked with them as directeur sportifs at HTC. While they undoubtedly contributed a great deal of experience and tactical savvy to the Manxman's tally of victories, one ingredient from the Telekom team that they've always tried to leave behind is EPO.

I'm not being snide here. I've said plenty of times that pre-Festina doping and post-Festina doping seem like very different things to me. The point is, packing a team full of domestiques capable of leading out sprints through the first week and towing leaders over mountains in the second and third isn't really as practical as it used to be in the bad old days of proper preparation.

There is a simple and practical solution, however. One that we all know, but which no one will dare say out loud: don't chase the Green Jersey. I love Cavendish to bits; he's made the first week of the Tour worth watching again, but he's only 26. In all likelihood, he's got at least four more years before his powers even begin to fade, and as Zabel showed, canny racing can still bag you points jerseys even after you stop being as powerfully and repeatably explosive as you once were.

Wiggins, on the other hand, is 31. He hasn't got many chances left. More importantly, how often in the last ten years have you seen a Grand Tour route with over 90K of Time Trialling in it? When Team GB saw how well suited to Cavendish this year's Worlds route was, they agreed to put aside all individual ambitions and ride for Cav. Team Sky need to apply the same logic to the Tour. The route suits Wiggins, and he'll never have a better chance to win the biggest prize in cycling. The team needs to be entirely and completely focussed on working for Bradley.

For one season, Cav needs to put his Tour ambitions aside. The team can build his program around the Giro or the Vuelta, or he could chase Milan-San Remo, Ghent-Wevelgem and Paris-Tours. He'll have plenty of opportunities to chase the Green Jersey in years to come, but I'd hate to see Wiggins lose his best shot at the Tour because Dave Brailsford thinks he can split the efforts of a clean team the way it used to be possible to split the efforts of an 'enhanced' squad.

Tour De France 2012: Phew...

That's a relief. Last week's leak of the route for the 2012 Tour De France route had me worried, but yesterday's official announcement has eased some of those misgivings.

When this year's Dauphine Libere avoided the sport's most famous climbs I'd assumed that organisers ASO were trying to give them a breather and keep them fresh for Le Tour. The leaked Tour route, however, had no big name mountain finishes either.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. The big names are all there-the 2012 Tour's 4 mountain stages will be going over the Croix de Fer, the Madeleine, the Glandon. the Aubisque, the Peyresourde, the Tourmalet, the Aspin and Port de Bales. That's a hell of a lot of big name mountains.

What's interesting is that none of them are hosting the finish. Little used or brand new mountains are taking those honours, perhaps in an attempt to introduce some new legends to the race. Two names stand out in particular, the Planche de Belle Filles and the Mur de Peguirre.

Belle Filles will feature on stage seven and looks hugely interesting. It reminds me of Pena Cabarga, too short for slow battles of attrition, but too steep  for careful group riding. With slopes of up to 20% and a 14% finish, we'll see some short, explosive attacks here. It won't ruin anyone's legs, but it should produce some big gaps that will ruin a few GC contenders.

Mur De Peguirre, on the other hand, reminds me a bit of Bola del Mundo. I've no idea how scrubby or misty it gets, but it has a similarly simplistic profile. It gets steeper. Then steeper. Then steeper still. Most mountains have some waver and wobble in their ascents. Not this one. Its percentages march steadily upwards in a way that must break a riders heart. If you're suffering halfway up, tough. It gets worse. If you're suffering three quarters of the way up, tough, it gets worse. If you're suffering in the final two K, tough. It gets worse. It isn't a nuanced mountain where riders will vary their tactics according to the gradients they prefer. It's a ramp that will ask more questions of the rider's hearts than their legs.

For all that the sheer  number of TT miles pretty much rules the Schlecks out of contention, this isn't a race that rules out the climbers. It favours TT specialists, certainly, but only the ones who can climb defensively as well-it favours TT specialists of the Evans or Wiggins stripe, not the Cancellara type.

When I first became interested in cycling in the 90s the oft heard logic was that science had made great advances against wind resistance, and none against gravity. It was said that pure climbers would never win Grand Tours again. Even Pantani's GT double in 98 was seen as a blip in the asendancy of the testers.

As it turned out, such predictions were far wide of the mark. More mountains, fewer time trials and the rise of the diesel climber over the explosive type has once again made the mountains the true testing ground of a GT. That's the way I like it, but I do look at this Tour de France route, which resembles a 90's course more than any I can remember, and I feel a frisson of anticipation. It's a route that demands versatility. I suspect we won't see any displays of crushing dominance from the winner, and with the exception of stage 17, maybe no moments of high drama that upend the race. On the other hand, I do think we'll have a close, unpredictable race, one where dramatic peaks and troughs are replaced with a constant buzz of tension. It might not be the sort of race I want to see every year, but it will be a good race, and it will have an enjoyably different tone.

The unluckiest team of the Tour?

Still here on Ventoux, wondering when I'll get back to televised sports and musing on the last televised sport I actually saw.

Most British cycling fans will currently be remembering the way that Cadel Evans spent most of the Dauphine Libere’s mountain stages closing small gaps to Bradley Wiggins’ back wheel and thinking to themselves “oh, what might have been?” But before we get too self-pitying about Bradley’s crash ruining Sky’s Tour, maybe we should stop to think about poor old Radioshack. After all, to lose one leader may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose three looks like carelessness.

Of course, losing four GC men and being able to say “It’s alright, we’ve still got Levi Leipheimer.” suggests a worrying lack of focus in the ‘shacks back room anyway. It probably stems from the days when Johann Bruyneel’s teams were built around a grumpy Texan and any rider who looked capable of spoiling Lance’s party would be signed up on fat wages as a super-domestique for Lance. Bruyneel is a man who’s used to fielding a lot of GC contenders at once; it’s just that this is the first time he’s done so without knowing who was really in charge on the road. With most of the squad approaching pensionable age and no sponsor lined up to take over from the departing Radioshack, Bruyneel’s super squad needed to perform. Unfortunately, having four leaders seemed to mean they had four times as many lightning rods for bad luck.

Levi Leipheimer fared best, finishing an hour and three minutes behind Evans after a series of crashes. At least he made it to Paris. Andreas Kloden once again proves to have far less desire than ability and quit on stage 13 after losing time to a sore elbow. Chris Horner and Janez Brajkovic offered rather more manly excuses for quitting: Horner rode to the finish of stage 7 with a concussion before supposedly asking if the race was still on, while Brajkovic also suffered a concussion on stage 5 but didn’t try to continue due to the fact that he’d broken his collarbone as well. There are probably a few Flandrian cycling fans out there who think such lack of gumption is shameful, but the rest of us are just glad that he’s young and will bounce back, which is more than can be said for anyone else in the squad. Finally there was Yaroslav Popovych, the former Tour and Giro top ten finisher whose Google search suggestions progress to ”Yaroslav Popovych Doping” with indecent haste. He failed to start stage 10 after suffering with a fever.

As if all that weren’t enough, Johan Bruyneel himself was pulled over during the race and breathalysed, something only marginally more embarrassing than his moonlight disappearance from this year’s Giro D’Italia when the hotel raids started. After years of triumph, the man has become a magnet for bad press.

With that in mind, the online wailing and gnashing of teeth over Bradley’s crash seems a little less justifiable. Sure, for British fans it’s hugely disappointing, but suggestions that Sky had the worst luck in the race are unfounded. They may have lost their leader, but they have two stage wins, Geraint Thomas has signed on for three more years, and they don’t face the sponsorship uncertainty of Bruyneel’s men. The next time we’re lamenting Sky’s misfortune let’s stop and remember that it could be worse - they could be Radioshack.

The Euro-Cycling Awards: Tour De France 2011

I'm lucky enough to be holidaying on Mt Ventoux, about which more later. It's quiet and relaxing and leaves me with plenty of time for thought, and what else would I be thinking about at the foot of Mt Ventoux?

Biggest Winner: Cadel Evans.

Sometime the biggest winner of the Tour isn’t necessarily the man who claims the Maillot Jaune. By the time Miguel Indurain claimed his fifth maillot jaune in 1995 his victory was seen as almost inevitable. Laurent Jalabert’s spirited attempt to claim it for himself on the road to Mende, on the other hand, established Jaja’s transformation from fat sprinter to top class GC rider as a fact. This year, however, the Tour winner and the Tour’s winner are one and the same. With some exciting attacks, gutsy defending and a strong time trial, Cadel Evans has erased from cycling’s collective memory his slappy hissy fit in 2009 or his unexpected inability to wrest control of the race from Carlos Sastre in the final TT of 08. No longer is he the grouchy nearly man, from now on he is Cadel Evans: Champion.

Biggest Loser: Andy Schleck.

It could all have been very different. The retrograde bravery of Schleck’s three-mountain dash through the Alps would have erased all memory of his stage 16 whingeing fit if only it had secured him overall victory. But it didn’t, which is why the lasting impression of Andy’s 2011 Tour will be his petulant whining that people don’t want to see dangerous downhills where fey Luxembourgeouis lose 70 odd seconds on their rivals. He claimed it shouldn’t have been allowed, but it didn’t seem to bother the 35 guys who finished ahead of him.

Jens Voigt Award for Conspicuous Toughness: Johnny Hoogerland

No surprise here. The injury itself isn’t in the same class as all those broken collarbones, wrists and vertebrae ridden through by the likes of Hamilton, Evans or Riis in previous GTs, but the psychological shock of being propelled off the road and into a barbed wire fence by a swerving car adds an extra layer of horror to those 33 stitches that Hoogerland rode to the finish with. His “Leeroy Jenkin’s” method of attacking has caused fans to question his sanity in the past, but no one will ever question his guts.

Johnny Hoogerland Award for Moves of Dubious Sanity: Jens Voigt

Ok, it’s his job to carry bottles and his nature to turn negatives into positives, but the sight of Jens Voigt falling off a mountain one minute, then body-checking France the next, before merrily going back to the team car to load up on bottles was crackers. Take a breath Jens, get the adrenaline twitches out of your system before messing with your weight distribution in front of a moving car on a steep mountain road.

Biggest Villain: France 2/3’s Hospitality Driver

I was tempted to give this to all the second tier sprinters who claim Cavendish is getting towed over the mountains whilst they’re busy being towed over the mountains. In any other Tour that would have clinched it, but this Tour had an obvious and embarrassing villain, and for once it wasn’t Ricardo Ricco. Worryingly, most Tour drivers are ex-riders themselves, so there’s a good chance that Johnny Hoogerland’s 33 stitches were dished out by someone who really should have known better.

Best Attack: Evans’ Downhill

He may have only grabbed a few seconds from Contador and Sanches, but Evans’ attack on stage 16 was about more than just time, it was about breaking from the norm and attack your rivals on a transition stage where everyone would normally be watching the breakaway. It was an unexpected and thoroughly enjoyable attack that made the Tour for me. Ruined it for Andy Schleck though.

Worst Defeat: Edvald Boasson Hagen

We can’t mock Edvald Boasson-Hagen with any real sincerity. After all, he had shingles a fortnight before the Tour yet still managed to turn up and bag two stages. Plenty of teams would have traded a years budget for that. Still, it so easily could have been three. On stage 16 Boasson-Hagen had a solid spot, behind Ryder Hesjedal for the launch but ahead of the brilliant but not-as-fast-as-he-used-to-be Hushovd. For a rider of Boassan-Hagen’s calibre it should have been a simple matter of spending more time looking backwards than forwards, making sure Hushovd couldn’t jump him until he was ready to jump Hesjedal. Sadly, you can pinpoint the single second when Boassan-Hagen’s concentration broke, the brief but pivotal lag between checking his front and turning back to cover his rear that was all Hushovd needed to get the drop in his compatriot.