le Tour - Stage One

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

July 9, 2007

If you wanted to see how cycling could be exciting, then this was the stage for you! The Tour organizers couldn’t have asked for a better way to hit off the first leg of the great race, then for a comeback win from Australian Robbie McEwan.

But we’ll get to that in a moment; first we’ll take a look at the race itself.

A breakaway of 5 men - Andrey Grivko, Freddy Bichot, Stephane Auge, and Aleksandr Kuschynski and David Millar – took out the race early, with Millar hoping to make good on his promise to win a stage of the tour. However the peloton, lead by riders from Credit Agricole, Quick Step, and Predictor-Lotto managed to slowly drag most of the breakaway back in to the fold. With Auge, Bichot and Kuschynski raising the pace of the breakaway to stay in front of the pack, Millar and Grivko fall off, leaving a 2 minute gap between the 3 leaders and the main group. Auge pushes it longer than his two fellow riders but all are eventually caught and brought back in to the fold.

I was really impressed with Stephane Auge’s race though. I tuned in a little late again as I was out with friends, and I saw him rocking all over his bike in comparison to the stable and almost fluidic motions of Bichot and Kuschynski. But he pushed it out long enough to gain himself some credibility, if not points. Maybe not a brilliant cycling brain, but a lot of heart.

Here’s where it starts to get interesting.

British hope Mark Cavendish and Australian Robbie McEwen are caught in a crash up the back of the peloton, and are isolated from the main pack by their support cars. Predictor-Lotto sent back 4 riders though to help Robbie get back to the peloton, and get back he did.

With 7 kilometers left in the race Robbie finally made it to the back of the pack, and promptly disappeared. As you can imagine, in a race with over a 150 riders all cramming the road full of sweat and Lycra, it is easy to lose track of a single rider. So it wasn’t until a few hundred meters to the line that we see Robbie McEwan literally rocket out of the pack somewhere, appearing as if out of nowhere, passing the favorite for the stage win Tom Boonen, and taking the win by over half a bicycle length.

The man thought he had broken his wrist it hurt so much, and still he took amazing risks to slide through that pack of riders to take the first stage win, and put his name down in the record books with one of the most stirring and gutsy wins you’ll see for a long time.

Thor Hushovd and Boonen came in following McEwan, and there is no change on the overall classification leaving CSC’s Fabian Cancellara with the yellow jersey for a second day. We’ll be waiting to see how long he holds that jersey, considering that for the next few races, the main focus will be on the sprinters before the mountain climbs begin. Will we see a sprinter making inroads on the overall position, or will Cancellara maintain a grip on his time-trial win.

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