le Tour - Prologue

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

July 9, 2007

My editors at CFP have been a little slow on the submission process, so I’m gonna post my two stage reviews here from the Tour de France.

In what can only be described as a mistake of biblical proportions, I decided to totally ignore my alarm clock after I hit the sack for a nap, and promptly missed any of the first stage of this year’s Tour de France. I am devastated, but thankfully, there are some helpful bloggers out there who have been able to catch me up on the details of this first stage.

For the newbies, I’ll just take a moment to outline what the first stage actually is.

Unlike the other stages where it is a race from start to finish, the first stage ‘time trial’ is a race against the clock. The aim is simply to get the fastest time from start to finish, and your only competitor is the clock ticking down in your head. Each rider is let out of the starting gate, separated by an interval of several minutes from the next rider. As the riders progress, the time to beat lessens, and the pace increases. Its high adrenaline racing, and high adrenaline watching.

I won’t bore you with endless stats of whose time was good as it was set, but take it for granted that riders like Dave Zabriskie, Vladimir Karpets, Michael Rogers, George Hincapie and Vladimir Gusev all made their mark on the tour early with fast rides on what was a very flat course.

We’ll look at the end of the race, and the two riders that now fill positions one and two on the overall leader’s board. With several checkpoints throughout the first leg one can get a feel for how the riders are doing. Andreas Klöden came through the main checkpoint with a whopping 8 seconds on current race leader Gusev, and finished up taking the lead with a time of 9:03.29 (that’s 9 minutes by the way).

However he was sent to the cleaners by the world Time Trial champ Fabian Cancellara from Team CSC who hit the same checkpoint as Klöden 7 seconds faster, and then hits the finish line at an amazing 8:50.74! He wasn’t Time Trial champion for nothing.

I’ll point out one interesting-ness for you, and that is one of my favorite riders Robbie McEwan’s performance. As I’ve mentioned, there are different classifications to the race, and riders who are after the Green Jersey (see earlier recap for rules and explanations) will not bother with legs that don’t concern them. The Time Trial is the perfect example of this, with this year’s favorite for the Green Jersey, Robbie McEwan, coming through at 9:59.15. In other words, he just pedaled through as if it was a training ride; wish I’d seen that, some of the antics of these guys make for some great viewing.

Well that’s it ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to go look for the first stage on the internet (shhhh… don’t tell anyone!) and see if I can’t get a firsthand look at what happened. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s recap, I promise I won’t’ go to sleep!

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