This Week in Road Cycling: July 14 to July 20

Hey everyone, welcome to this week in Road Cycling. Your one stop shop for everything I feel like telling you about bike racing. I'm don't really have anything worthwhile to mention in this part of my post, so I'm just going to get on with it.

Local Racing:

Week in Review:
-See how blank this is? Pretty exciting right?

Races in July:
-Tortilla Flats RR (Series): Every (Except the second Tuesday of every month) Tuesday starting May 20 though August 12. http://www.azcycling.com/08cal/FLYERS/tft_08.pdf
-Flatjack Flats Time Trial: 7/26: Tucson, AZ http://www.summitveloracing.org/files/pdfs/FFTTFlyer_draft.pdf
-Picacho Time Trial Series: 7/27: Picacho, AZ http://www.saguarovelo.org/infopicacho.htm
-AZ Track Championships (San Diego Velodrome): 7/19-7/20. http://www.saguarovelo.org/velodrome.html

Pro Racing:

Tour de France:

Stage 3: Two French guys, an American, and an Italian went on a pleasant ride through the countryside. One of those French guys (Samuel Dumoulin - Cofidis) won and another French guy (Romain Feillu - Agritubel) took yellow. Also, Riccardo Ricco lost some time to the favorites as part of his sneaky plan -- more on that later.

Stage 4: The first time trial of the Tour was supposed to be really easy to call. Evans was going to gain time on all the other contenders, and Cancellara was going to win and wear the maillot jaune for a few days. Well, Evans did gain some time but Cancellara didn't win. In fact, Stefan Schumacher came through to surprise everyone, winning by 18 seconds over a strong Kim Kirchen. Moving himself into the maillot jaune. And what about Cancellara? When asked about his obviously pathetic fifth place for the day, he responded by saying, "I'm not a robot." That sounds to me a lot like something a robot would say to trick you into thinking that it's not a robot. Nice try Fabian...

Stage 5: Breakaway > Catch > Sprint > Cavendish. Throw in a little crash by Valverde, and you have a relatively boring day in the Tour. Schumacher remains in yellow.

Stage 6: Sneaky Little Cobra. Riccardo Ricco took the win on the climb to Super Besse in front of many of the races big guns. Race leader Schumacher crashed by running into Kirchen's wheel during the finale, and Kirchen moved into the lead. Ok, two things. One, how sweet is it that the stage finished in a place called Super Besse? Am I the only one who pictures a cow with a cape and super powers? Second, Schumacher losing the lead the way he did is eerily poetic. Several years ago he won the Eneco Tour by knocking down George Hincapie close to the line. The only difference is that nobody cares about who won the Eneco Tour, while leading the Tour is sort of a big deal.

Stage 7: Luis Leon Sanchez (Caisse D'Epargne) soloed in for a stage win. Behind him, CSC-Saxo Bank rode their bikes really hard.

Stage 8: Mark Cavendish (Columbia) proved that he's a really fast sprinter by winning again. Ricco decided to add another layer to his sneaky plan (that I will explain soon) by crashing. Kirchen stayed in yellow.

Stage 9: Ricco won again, and Evans crashed. This makes for the fifth(Cunego, Ricco, Valverde, Schumacher, Evans) big name to hit the deck in this race.

Theory Time!!!

Here's the thing. Riccardo Ricco got second in the Giro D'Italia back in May. He got second to a man who claims to have spent the week before the Giro on the beach, on vacation. To say that Ricco has an ego would be an understatement, he gave himself the nickname the Cobra, and he claims that he scares his opponents by staring into their souls. A guy like this doesn't like to lose, especially to a Spaniard who claims to have not really been trying. For that reason, I believe Ricco has been lying about his intentions during the Tour. He has claimed that he's only going for stage wins, and that he's not going to contest the overall, but I don't buy it. I think that Ricco is going to do his best to win the Tour de France, and if he does, will claim that he did it without even trying. I'm going to call this strategy "The Contador." Even if my theory is a load of crap, Ricco managed to steal back over a minute to Kirchen.

Stage 10: Ricco's good buddy and teammate Lenardo Piepoli (Saunier Duval-Scott) won atop the Hautacam. In fact, it was a 1, 2 for Saunier Duval with Juan Jose Cobo coming in with Piepoli for second. Meanwhile, a few minutes back the race was being completely changed. My pick for yellow in Paris, Alejandro Valverde, lost about 3.5 minutes to the rest of the pre-race favorites. Cadel Evans recovered from his crash yesterday and climbed steadily enough to get his first maillot jaune ever. Good for him. Frank Schleck climbed well enough to move into second, just one second back from Evans. Finally, some big news for American Christian Vande Velde who is now sitting in third place overall. There was way too much awesome today for me to properly convey it through sentences peppered with pictures. This years Tour is just awesome.


-Anthony

P.S. Versus is replaying their coverage of the Tour a lot this year. It's one of the plus sides to their being two American teams in the race. You can see the schedule here.