Le Tour, Interrupted

Sharknado (sans Tara Reid) !!

As the Tour winds down to a close, it is time to pay the proverbial piper. With the two main contenders long gone (and one looking to be gone even longer), this year's tour was set to be an exciting contest of musical chairs as the best of the rest fought for the three podium positions. But, as they would say in Gaul during the era of Caesar - "Baahhhrrrmph!" What the tour has instead turned into is a biking version of a famous Spielberg movie that involved a lot of sharp teeth! The Shark tore through the school of  "minnows," with a ferocity not seen in the recent years of more conservative cycling in the Tour, thereby exposing the gulf in the talents of the real tour contenders and the pretenders. If you are already bored by the no-contest with a couple of stages to go, maybe searching for the elusive silver lining from this year's tour can be a good exercise for the grey matter? Jeeves would certainly agree!

• The two-tiered pro-cycling peloton: Yes, the tour has cruelly exposed what we knew informally all along. There are the big guys, and then there are the really big guys, the ones who stand on the podium, you know? What this says about the concentration of money/talent/resources in the WorldTour teams is a debate for the interwebs and fan forums to speculate, but a positive result of this contrast would be for the less successful teams to invest more into the future of their star riders. One can certainly hope so.
  
  
• The French Connection: As of stage 18, there are 3 french riders in top 10 (and 4 in top 15 counting Pierre Rolland) with two of them on the virtual podium! The fight for the second (and third) place on this year's tour has actually been quite exciting to watch, with attacks and counterattacks coming on calculated ascents with the goal of putting a few seconds into the competitor's timing. The two teams that have benefitted the most are FDJ.fr and AG2R. One would have expected that the Europcar team would seize this opportunity to put Voeckler on the podium in what appears to be one of his last tours, but once again the Cubs of cycling have provided excitement and entertainment, but no results! On the other hand, a tour success should instill a lot of self belief in the youngsters (Pinot and Bardet - yay, Pinot!) who are no longer playing second fiddle and are genuinely in contention to be on a podium in Paris. The fact that AG2R are leading the team classification itself speaks volumes about how different the team tactics have played out this year (more on team tactics below.)
  
  
• Stage victories matter: The lack of GC leadership at Saxo-Tinkoff, OPQS and Sky have left the teams with no other option but to chase stage victories. A side effect of this process has been the metamorphosis of the super domestiques into solo stage winners - reflecting the true depth of their talents! It has been refreshing to see Mike Rogers win his first stage at the Tour, watch the normally metronomic Vasili Kiriyienka animate stages in breakaways, cheer Rafal Majka to his KoM jersey, and who but the most heartless would have not rooted for Tony Martin as he broke away from the peloton in stage 9? What the Tour lacked in starpower, it has more than made up in drama and intrigue on a lower scale.
  
  
• The Italian Job: Yes, Nibali outsharked everyone with his performance (rather, lack of) in the Criterium du Dauphine, but maybe the sly squalo had a few aces up his sleeves when the world was looking the other way? He has certainly been THE rider of the Tour so far, and with a solid 7'10" advantage going into the time trial, he is sure to put on the yellow in Paris barring some unforeseen event. He does have a pesky "fox" to tackle with, but with a separation of 7'25" after stage 18, it is quite impossible for Valverde to make time on Nibali.
  
  
• All Eggs in One Basket, or Not: Team Sky, OPQS and Saxo-Tinkoff went all in with their aces (Froome, Cav and Contador respectively) but were left playing with Jokers after the first week of the tour! OPQS and S-T were able to reset their expectations and hunt for stage victories, but Sky failed to look beyond the podium, and frankly, Richie Porte was in no form to be up there with the podium hunters. By the time the boys-in-blue woke up to the reality, they were roundly beaten by the (mostly) French, Dutch and Spanish armada who stormed ahead on the team rankings. Team Sky Principal has been on record saying that next year, they would probably do better with a more balanced approach to the WorldTour calendar. A lesson well learnt!

It is not yet time for a full post-mortem on the tour (look at the White Jersey rankings - surely that merits a discussion all by itself!) and anything can happen on the road to Paris, but we can all agree that the pre-Tour script has been up-ended in the most interesting ways possible. No matter where your team/rider allegiance lies, in the end, we are all rooting for bikers, and biking!