Tour de France 2009: Why Lance Armstrong Will Win the Tour Why Lance Will Win It's too early to tell who will win the Tour de France--but Bicycling's Bill Strickland is sure that Lance Armstrong will win an eighth this year. By Bill Strickland
Lance Armstrong rides easy during the first rest day of the 2009 Tour de France © Getty Conventional wisdom--and plenty of experts--will tell you that it's much too early to predict the winner of the 2009 Tour de France. For one thing, the 21-stage, 3,459.5-kilometer race is barely into its second week. For another, the two top contenders - Astana teammates Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong--are separated by just two seconds. Finally, the four toughest mountain stages are yet to come, including the most highly anticipated, Stage 20 (which finishes atop Mont Ventoux and, coming the day before the largely processional stage that marks the Tour's end in Paris, is the last chance for anyone to gain serious time). Those are three good reasons to declare the race wide open. But they're also exactly why I believe Armstrong will win. To understand that, first you have get past some red herrings, such as the hubbub about Astana's team dynamics. Without a doubt, the rivalry between Armstrong and Contador is fascinating - and great entertainment for the fans. But when the crux of this Tour comes, I think it's most likely that, despite all the talk of loyalty and honor codes and inspiration, Astana's racers--who are, after all, professionals--will support whichever guy seems more likely to bring them a victory and a bigger paycheck. In fact, not doing so would be a bad career move: What team is going to hire a guy who helped throw the world's most important race because he didn't like the leader? Even if the team does end up divided, that kind of drama will color the victory without deciding it. Think about the last legendary intra-team rivalry, the 1986 brawl between five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault and his heir apparent Greg LeMond. It was an epic of open animosity that makes Astana look like a Sunday school class, but the strongest man won. Also, forget about Armstrong's age. It's true that at 37 he'd be the oldest winner ever, but in this sporting era of 41-year-old Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, nobody can definitively claim that Armstrong's performance will deteriorate because of the number of candles on his birthday cake. And though the seven-time Tour winner's ability to power his pedal strokes with rage seems to be a real phenomenon, once you're in the realm of pop psychology you can make any argument you want. Contador forged his own steely comeback after surviving a brain aneurysm and having his skull cracked open in surgery, so who's to say that Armstrong's anger won't burn itself out against the Spaniard's resilience? The one thing that really matters is that, with four mountain stages in the final week, this year's Tour especially favors the rider who gains the most strength--mental as well as physical--in the last seven days of racing. That's Armstrong. He is universally acknowledged to be a rider who physically improves deep into a stage race, and doesn't fall victim to tactical blunders that arise from fatigue. This is true not only of his past Tour wins, which began in 1999 after his comeback from cancer, but of his performance in the Giro d'Italia in May. At the beginning of that three-week stage race, he was dropped from the lead group on every key climb. By Stage 17, he was attacking the lead group (though, still in the process of riding into peak form, he never challenged for the win). In contrast, Contador has a history of coming into stage races at a peak and losing form. When he won the 2007 Tour, he was 9 seconds slower than his teammate, Levi Leipheimer, in the final mountain stage. (He also lost 47 seconds to Michael Rasmussen, who was then wearing the yellow jersey but would be withdrawn by his team in relation to allegations that he'd evaded several out-of-competition drug tests.) Two stages later, in the final individual time trial, Contador lost 2:18 to Leipheimer and 1:27 to Cadel Evans, who finished second overall. In the 2008 Vuelta a Espana - the third of his Grand Tour victories - Contador lost 31 seconds to Leipheimer in the Stage 20 time trial. Many people - including some on the team - believe Leipheimer could have won that Vuelta had he not already agreed to play domestique. It's telling that the only three-week victory in which Contador grew stronger was the 2008 Giro d'Italia. That's the one that Astana was initially not invited to (along with that year's Tour). Contador, famously, hadn't trained for the race and was vacationing on a beach when he found out his team had been unexpectedly invited. In his book We Might as Well Win (which I co-wrote), Astana team director Johan Bruyneel says Contador at first refused to participate because he felt his fitness wasn't high enough. Contador doesn't collapse--he's still a great champion, the best stage racer of generation and an apparent legend in the making. But, at least in this point of his career, he doesn't respond as positively to the rigors of the final week as Armstrong does. And this year's Tour has such an extreme final week that this slight difference between them will put Armstrong in yellow. Stage 15 has four Category 3 climbs and one Category 2, plus a finish atop Verbier, a Category 1 mountain that ascends 8.8 km at an average grade of 7.5 percent. (In the Tour de France, climbs are ranked in difficulty from Category 4, the easiest, up to HC, or hors categorie, which is so hard that it is considered beyond categorization.) After a rest day, the Tour goes over the HC col du Grand Saint-Bernard, drops for 35k, then ascends the 22.6-km, Category 1 col du Petit Saint-Bernard before plummeting 29k to the finish. On the 24.4-km Grand Saint-Bernard, four of the final 5 km hit an average slope of 9 to 9.5 percent. (For reference, that's the kind of steepness that within a block or two makes the general public get off their bikes and walk.) Stage 17 has a Category 2 and four Category 1 climbs, of which the final two, col de Romme and col de la Colombiere are essentially combined into one long monster. Romme is only 8.8 km but starts off with kilometers of 9.8, 10.5 and 9.1 percent and averages 8.9 overall. The route drops just 5 km from Romme's crest before crashing into the 7.5-km Colombiere, whose final 10.2-percent kilometer is preceded by 3 km at 9 percent. Then, at the end of the 167-kilometer Stage 20, comes Mont Ventoux. It rises 21.1 km at 7.6 percent, combines nasty stretches of 9- and 10-percent just after the start and in the middle, and finishes on an exposed, wind-swept, sun-baked lunar-like landscape whose final two kilometers average 9.5 percent. Somewhere in there, Contador will falter and Armstrong won't. I'm going to guess that Stage 16 will be decisive, though the time gaps won't stop shifting until the riders stand atop Ventoux. To be fair, there are others in the race, as well. Of the riders who could still be considered legitimate contenders, Garmin-Chipotle's Christian Vande Velde is 1:16 behind Armstrong; Saxo Bank's Andy Schleck is 1:41 down; Cervelo's Carlos Sastre is 2:44 back; and Silence-Lotto's Cadel Evans has 2:59 to make up. (The current owner of the yellow jersey, AG2R rider Rinaldo Nocentini, who leads the second-place Contador by six seconds, isn't a threat for the overall win.) With super-domestiques Leipheimer (who has finished third in the Tour) and Andreas Kloden (who's twice finished second), Astana probably has the firepower to contain those riders. If not, both Armstrong and Contador should be able to minimize any time losses in the 40.5-km time trial in Stage 18. In addition, Armstrong is in uncertain territory this year. In his victorious Tours, he's never not been in yellow by the time three mountain stages passed. (Stage 9 was the third this year.) Of his seven Tour de France wins, he'd been in yellow by the third mountain stage five times and, in the other two, he took yellow that stage. In fact, in three of his wins, he took the jersey the first time he got to the mountains, and this year he lost time to Contador. So he's clearly not the same rider. But in the all-important third week, he will be. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DarkAndDirty" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/DarkAndDirty?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
