le tour
14th-jul-2008 - posted by dtra
just thought i'd post a snippet about the tour, i was watching last night, and originally was just going to watch to the top of the tourmalet, then it was already past midnight, so i thought i'd just stick it out and see what happened (and now i'm stuffed 
). well, a bit more than an hour later, the two saunier duval riders came in first and second, followed by frank schleck, and then a few others, and cadel evans just over two minutes down, but it was enough to get him into the yellow jersey for the first time. i was a bit surprised to see valverde dropped on the tourmalet, but jens voight is a monster. i reckon he was riding blind (he had sunnies on so it was hard to tell), but someone was probably telling him which way to turn, cos the way he was riding i don't think it would be possible to concentrate on more than just pedalling. that was a monster ride, i've been up mount hotham, i don't know how they compare, but the tourmalet and hautacam climbs looked pretty ridiculous, once they crack, i don't know how they have the will to keep pedalling till they finish.
everyone says cadel shouldn't take the yellow cos his team isn't strong enough to defend it, but the way i see it, there's no real difference him being one second in front to him being one second behind. he still has to watch the other guys exactly the same way, having the yellow now is irrelevant either way, it's all about managing the time until the final time trial really. let's hope that he keeps it up, and doesn't have any more of those strange crashes, and is standing on the podium with the yellow jersey in paris.
pic taken from the age site.
#33 dtra (david tran)
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i hope everyone in australia stays up tonight, this is gonna be the ultimate stage, and could decide the tour, three hors categorised climbs end to end over the lat 150km finishing on top of alp d'huez. that's gonna be crazy, cadel still has the time trial up his sleeve, so he should only go with the climbers if he feels good.
dtra
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19:57 22nd-jul-2008
poor cadel, he should just move to the new russian team and maybe they can afford to bring in a stronger team to support him. pop's getting a lot of blame, but he is just one man, the rest of the team is still pretty much built around robbie mcewen, they're all flat land riders.
dtra
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20:56 26th-jul-2008