You’ve seen it all before: One team at the front in a mountain stage, keeping the pace high while the pack behind them is reduced to the 30-40 strongest in the race. Then the team leader places his decisive move on the final climb and wins.

HOWEVER: Which team is the team leader on? Does the work from the team increase the chances of their own leader of his competition? The speed is the same for everybody, does it matter if the pace is set by a guy in a blue or a red jersey? Cycling seems to believe it does, and obviously all the years that the team was Postal/Discovery and the team leader was Lance, it would seem to be the case. But does anybody really believe Lance rode away from his rivals because it was his teammates setting the tempo instead of Ulrich’s teammates?

The Tour de Suisse 2011 saw Leopard setting tempo “Postal-style” perfectly putting Frank Schleck in position with 5km to go. Then all his rivals proceeded to ride away from him. To Plateau de Beille, Leopard once again set the pace, and once again nothing happened on the climb. And why would it? While Andy sits comfortably at the end of his train, Contador sits comfortably behind him.

If you’re having a really lousy day, having your team set a tempo you can deal with, while dissuading another team from setting a higher tempo would be a good idea. But “making the race hard for others” also makes it hard for yourself and is hardly a tactic. This fact remains intact even if one of these stages a team sets tempo and their leader wins. Wasting your team like that doesn’t help, but it doesn’t prevent you from making a winning move either.

Note: I wrote this on Tuesday, so who knows what happened in the Alps. But it doesn’t matter, the facts remain even if somebody by chance “finishes off the beautiful work by his team”.

Note: I wrote this yesterday before Contador lit up the stage to Gap. I see no reason (and have no time as I am traveling to France today) to change it, although my realistic #3 seems less realistic now:

Before the Tour I predicted that Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador would NOT finish 1st and 2nd (in whatever order). I stand by that prediction. So how about a top-3 at this stage of the game? Well, since crashes, etc become a bit less likely now that the peloton is getting tired (strange really, that fatigue makes it safer), I have two top-3s.

My dream Top-3 mixed with some bits of reality would be:

1. Voeckler
2. Danielson
3. Taaramae (always thought he was a cool rider)

But it would take 8 people falling out of the top-10 to make that happen, which may be a stretch. Thinking about what will really happen, it might be closer to this:

1. Contador
2. Evans
3. Andy Schleck

The reason I think Contador will win is that he should get in better shape as he continues to recover from the first week spills (if that is really what has been holding him back), and he can deliver a flawless time trial. At the same time, many of his rivals have a proven ability to fluff the time trial when it really matters. The real dark horse is of course Voeckler, and I do think he actually has a chance to finish on the podium instead of Andy Schleck. It would be good for the sport. As usual, the Zoetemelk clause for predictions applies.

Few attacks amongst the leaders, no gaps in the end, what’s going on? I think there are three main reasons that led to this result:

1. Aerodynamics. You should read this piece by Sportsscientists.com. Nice to see some logical analysis backed up by numbers. First important point they make is that the level of performance is still quite high but not as high as 5-6 years ago.Second, if the performance delta between the leaders is small, even on the climbs the benefit of drafting will keep a group together.
2. Individual setbacks. While it would be nice to conclude that we now have a larger group of similarly performing riders, this may be too optimistic. Last year the Tour, Andy Schleck and Contador were way above the rest. Have the rest caught up or is it, by coincidence, reduced form for both of them? Andy Schleck has had mediocre form (by his standards) and several setbacks this whole season, to the extent that even his own team thought Frank had better chances this Tour. Contador has the Giro in his legs, the clenbuterol case in his head and the pain in his knee, so it is easy to see he won’t be performing at his 2010 Tour level. Maybe most contenders are simply riding as could be expected of them (except Voeckler) and the top-2 are struggling for their individual reasons.
3. Brotherly love. Many people say that with the Schleck brothers, 1+1=3. I think it’s more 1+1=1.5. It seems neither wants to do anything to further their own chances if it may hurt their brother’s, and you can’t win the Tour that way. Andy did manage to gap most of the other team leaders on a few occasions up Plateau de Beille, but he always looked back where Frank was and then stopped. Maybe he couldn’t do any better, maybe he wanted to keep Frank’s chances alive. It’s unlikely you  can gap all other contenders on the same day, so you will need several breakaways with different “passengers” to create room on GC. On Plateau de Beille Andy may have been able together with Evans to gap Contador, and in the Alps he could try the reverse. That in itself is hard enough, to try and do it without allowing Evans or Contador to gap Frank on occasion is impossible. Their complaint that nobody else tried anything seems odd when they didn’t really commit to their own jumps 100%.

OK, picking this list back up again from Toby Stanton on the 11 traits to being a champion. Plenty of this in the Tour de France:

Tenacious: Certainly one of the primary traits that all champions show is tenacity. They just keep on coming whether it be a part of their training, a race or another part of their lives. Adversity is only a step in the process rather than an impassable hurdle.

I can’t believe this wasn’t picked up by the mainstream cycling media (oh, the journalists :-). On June 30, Fabian Cancellara tweeted:

Dinner table discussion @leopardtrek…. Is the moon landing true….!!?? There are meany opinions about a big hugh lie. Is it true.??

Now, this may look like innocent banter, but in fact it attacks Frank Schleck’s core belief system. After all, his Twitter intro text is:

Don t tell me the sky is the limit, if there are footprints on the moon!

[Whole spiel about Frank Schleck now going to Sky deleted – not funny. Why the rest of this post was allowed to stay is unclear]

And yes, I do know that “Don’t tell me the sky is the limit, if there are footprints on the moon” is an idiotic expression to begin with. For most people, the moon is in the sky (Thanks to The Apprentice UK for spreading the word), and furthermore there are definitely no footprints on the moon, as it is way too cold to walk barefoot up there. Shoe prints maybe. Hm, or perhaps that’s how we finally figure out that the whole thing is fake, when we see footprints in the video? But I digress.

Thank goodness the rest day is over and there are some real things to write about again.