Author: Alex
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Stage nine time trial – detailed analysis
Okay, so Cadel Evans rode quite fast, but Chris Froome rode faster and Bradley Wiggins rode FASTER STILL. Time trials are pretty easy to get your head around. There’s actually even less to consider in the Tour de France than when you’re doing your own personal time trial over a familiar route. In the Tour,…
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Half an idea what’s happening in the Tour de France
If you’ve no idea what’s going on in the Tour de France, here’s an update from someone with half an idea. Lesson one: forget about all the guys who won stages in the first week. They were just making hay while the road was flat. Yesterday it was onto the serious business. One of the…
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Chris Froome – your favourite British rider
We quite like both Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, but they’re not to everyone’s tastes. Chris Froome, however – as a Brit, how can you not get behind Chris Froome? The man has been suffering from bilharzia, a tropical parasite, for the last couple of years. He picked it up in Kenya, where he was…
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Crashes on stage six knacker up the general classification
Never mind Peter Sagan’s third stage victory, today’s flat stage had a big impact on the general classification. ‘General classification’ isn’t a particularly catchy way of referring to the overall times, so we’ll be tagging relevant posts “yellow” from now on. The Tour de France is rarely won. It is more about who loses last.…
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Andre Greipel’s legs
I was massively disappointed that Anthony Delaplace didn’t get into the break today, but I was less disappointed that Mark Cavendish was beaten by everyone’s favourite wide-mouthed Germanic meat sack in the sprint. You need only take one look at Andre Greipel’s legs to know that it’s right that he win races. When someone has…
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How powerful is Andre Greipel?
Andre Greipel’s angry mashing got him over the line first today. I’m glad I’m not a pedal. He was lucky in that he didn’t have to beat Mark Cavendish who was mangled in a pile-up about 2.7km from the finish. He beat everyone else though. Like any Greipel win, it was a triumph of leg…
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Peter Sagan and his victory celebrations
Peter Sagan once won the Slovak Cup on his sister’s bike after selling his own and then finding that the replacement from his sponsor had been delayed. If anyone tells me it wasn’t a ‘sit up and beg’ bike with a basket on the front, I will not listen. Some stories are better if you…
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Mark Cavendish bollocks Kenny Van Hummel while sprinting
One of stage three’s highlights was seeing Mark Cavendish bollock Kenny Van Hummel during and immediately after the intermediate sprint. Van Hummel had done a bit of a manoeuvre and Cavendish felt it necessary to tell him how he felt about this. For maximum emasculation, he did this while basically just drifting past Van Hummel,…
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Three reasons why Mark Cavendish is inhuman
1. The ability to maintain a high speed Not the speed of the sprint, the speed of the run-in. The peloton was doing 45mph over the last few miles of Stage 2 of this year’s Tour and riders were disappearing out the back because they couldn’t maintain that flat speed even when drafting someone else.…
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Anthony Delaplace is a nutcase
Peter Sagan’s victory was new. Anthony Delaplace being in a Tour de France break wasn’t. Delaplace is a nutcase. Most people won’t know Delaplace. He’s only 22 and he hasn’t really won anything yet. However, as we remember it, he was in every single break last year. Being in the break is an exercise in…