Stage 17: Primoz Roglic unsurprisingly quick downhill
Last year Primoz Roglic was one hundredth of a second away from wearing the leader’s jersey in the Giro d’Italia. He went on to win the second time trial in that race, even though it…
Stage 16: Michael Matthews welcomes hills and crosswinds
Proof that the best way to beat Marcel Kittel in a sprint is to bin him long before the finishing straight. As I said before the race, the German tends to fade a bit as…
Stage 11: Marcel Kittel superior to the point of it becoming a bit boring
There are various levels of dominance. When results seem so predictable that no-one’s really interested any more, you really are on top. Marcel Kittel has now won five of the 11 stages at this year’s…
Stage 10: Marcel Kittel sticks with the obvious road to the green jersey
First up, a bit of green jersey housekeeping because I omitted a couple of pertinent developments from stage nine, what with focusing on the general classification and all. Most strikingly, Arnaud Demare, who was doing…
Stage seven: Photography is Marcel Kittel’s friend
Another win for Marcel Kittel, this time by somewhere around half a millimetre, but they all count. I presume the race judges ruled that Kittel had a crucial bit of grit affixed to his tyre…
Stage six: Marcel Kittel or Arnaud Démare?
A three-week race has to have a bit of ebb and flow. You wouldn’t be able to perceive peaks if there were no such thing as valleys. After a couple days of high drama, stage…
Stage two: Marcel Kittel in no mood for upsets
If Marcel Kittel has a weakness as a sprinter, it’s ensuring he’s at the pointy end of the race when he has a couple of hills in his legs. There were no real hills today…
Mark Cavendish elicits a strop from Marcel Kittel
The thing about headwinds is, they slow you down. If Marcel Kittel had been one of the four men who had ridden near enough 200km into one as part of the break, he’d have been…
Marcel Kittel is slightly stronger than Bryan Cocquard is light
This year’s Tour de France will, at some point, throw up a winner you probably haven’t heard of. But not yet. Marcel Kittel was the latest to elicit a “yeah, I thought it was about…
Green jersey contenders in 2016
I’ve been putting off writing this points competition preview for a few days now and presumed there was some reason for this – nothing conscious, just some mystic message from the cosmos saying: “No, don’t…
