Yesterday, I wrote that Alberto Contador was devoid of team-mates for most of the final stage of the Dauphiné and so Pierre wrote to ask:
“Were they all just knackered from the previous day’s efforts or are they just going to be shit at the Tour de France?”
The short answer is that Contador was riding with the B-Team. I’m pretty sure there’s an episode of the A-Team where a bunch of four blokes is pretending to be the A-Team. One’s black, one’s got grey hair, one wears a cap, but they’re all wrong and nowhere near as good. That’s basically who Contador was riding with at the Dauphiné.
At the Tour, the yellow and blue clad Tinkoff-Saxo team is going to be very, very strong. It will almost certainly include Michael Rogers and Roman Kreuziger and that’s just for a start.
Rogers’ idea of getting into form involves winning Grand Tour stages. Winning stage 11 of this year’s Giro wasn’t enough for him. He also found it necessary to triumph atop the Zoncolan, one of the hardest climbs in professional cycling. Rogers was the road captain for Team Sky when Bradley Wiggins won the Tour. He’s a useful bloke to have around.
Kreuziger came fifth in the Tour last year, but would have finished higher had he not spent half his time riding totally inefficiently in a bid to help an under-par Contador put some of his more optimistic plans into practice. That was his third top ten finish in the race and he also won Amstel Gold last year.
I’m not exactly sure who else will be in the team, but it could include Nicolas Roche and the up-and-coming Rafal Majka, both of whom would normally expect to be leading a team in a Grand Tour.
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