Its been two years since he decimated the field at the 2004 Dauphine Ventoux ITT.
Today’s stage pretty well Mirrors the ugliest stage of the TdF, taking in Galibier, Glandon/Croix de Fer and Les Tuissuere. Only diff is that they start in Briancon vs Bourg d’Oisins, which makes the stage slightly shorter.
Here is a profile of the TdF stage. This is the stage where Ullrich will either stay in contention or blow it. The ascent to Les Tuissuire favours the power to weight of Basso. My man Jan better lose a few kilos.
bump…let’s discuss Iban if we aren’t going to discuss this stage on the TdF. Can Iban be a factor again. If anything else, he is going to be gunning for stage wins. He could be Basso’s biggest weapon in the high mtns, towing him to big time gaps on Jan. I am not sure if Jan has the team to respond to this. He is going to be on his own and better be on the wheels of Iban Mayo, Valverde and Basso on all those mountain stages or his hopes are toast. Someone better be rationing Jan’s daily calories between now and LeTour or he could lose the TdF in June!
It will also be interesting to see how this Tour de Suisse plays out. Is Basso gonna go hard and gun for stage wins and overall or just cruise and hold back till July (as per the Directeur Sportif Slowman’s recommendations)?
Here’s my take on what happened today and what’s going to happen at the Tour:
Iban Mayo may be back winning, but he isn’t 100% ready to be called a favorite yet - remember he lost 10 minutes on Ventoux and admitted that it was because he didn’t have the legs not because he was holding back. I’d say his stock has gone up after yesterday and today, but mainly as a potagonist for stage wins. I say he looses 4 minutes to Jan and 2 minutes to Basso on the stage 7 TT and puts all his effort into winning at Pla de Beret. I would give him a VERY good chance of winning that stage, but not being able to hold one to the three in a row Alpine program. He looked very good today when he dropped Valverde
George isn’t 100% ready to be called a Tour favorite yet (i know you already think that) but clearly Azevado is the class of the Disco team at the Dauphine. he’s climbing well and his TT was pretty good. But even he couldn’t keep up with Levi / Moreau today
Floyd Landis is the big loser to come out of the Dauphine as a way to make a statement coming into the Tour. The only statement he made was that his TT is as good as ever and that he still can’t handle the big long climbs as a team leader. Clearly he held back once being dropped, but shouldn’t have been dropped half way up Ventoux or Izoard in the first place.
The Tour de Swiss will show how Jan’s form is, but he actually wasn’t climbing that bad at the Giro. he was consistently losing 5 to 10 minutes off Basso, but even on some of the tough stages he was never in the autobus, just in the 3rd / 4th group. I get the idea that he was riding at a very controlled pace. I think the thing with Jan is that he just does not like to suffer and after so many years of pushing as hard as he can just to get beat by Lance he doesn’t like to “dig deep” unless absolutely necessary. I think that’s his downfall because he doesn’t do enough REALLY HARD training. I think Jan’s win in the Giro TT shows he’s building his form and I think he will show up almost ready (like he always does) hoping to hit his peak form at the first TT. This year’s race really favors him since he is always strongest in week 3 and there is only one mountain top finish in week 2
Levi is for real. nothing more needed here.
Watch out for some very opportunistic attacks this year at the Tour. I think almost every stage will look like the finish of the Ventoux Dauphine stage with people you never expected on the attack with 5, 4, 3 and 2 k to go.
Finally I think you are wrong about Jan’s team. He will bring one of the most experienced and best quality teams he’s ever had to the Tour this year. They won’t be his downfall and anyway it’s going to be up to CSC to control the peloton this year - and I’m not 100% sure they can do it.
Cidewar, many great points. You are right about Mayo…not an overall contender, but certain the guy who will be in thick of the steepest climbing stages that it will affect the outcome more for Jan than for Basso. As for Floyd being dropped on Ventoux, the first 12K or have the very steepest parts and it is relentless. This is the place where everyone gets dropped. If someone is in the “group” at the Chalet Reynard when the road opens up to the moonscape, they are likely making it to the top “attached”. I’m not at all surprised that Floyd got dropped early. That being said, it is great that if he is going to have a bad day that it happen in June, not July.
As for Jan not liking to suffer, you likely have a point. But to some extent, this is what makes him so much more “human” and “likeable”. He is more like us average Joes. This guy gains weight, he loses it, he messes up his training, shows flashes of brilliance, does drugs, crashes vehicles, eats cake, yet plugs on and is always in the thick of the action when it counts in July. To some extent he succeeds in spite of himself. He just has the misfortune of sharing the same podium over the same years as a once in a century type of athlete like Lance Armstrong. I just wonder what makes “Jan Tick”. It does not seem to be an incredible drive to win at all costs like many champions. If I had a choice to spend a week riding and dining with Jan or Lance, you can bet I’d want to share my time with the big German…at least you can bet that we’d have a great time at the all you can eat buffet after a 100 miler!
Back to the topic of this thread, I can really see the Spanish Armada trying to breakaway on the Tour stage cited above just like they did today. The final ascent on the Col de Croix de Fer Glandon could easily see Jan getting detached long before the final ascent to Les Tuissuires with Basso along for the ride.
I would much rather spend a week riding with Jan then Lance - I think the Jan week would involve some hard training in Tuscany, some good Chiantis, and some really good food! Plus have you ever seen the girls that do the promo work for T-Mobile at the Tour - get a couple of them to drive support and it would be the perfect training week!!!
Seriously however I think Jan will show up in shape and it will be a tough tour (a la 2004) but I think Basso may be too tough to beat if he’s not exhausted from the Giro - he is so strong - the amount of time he put into everyone on the Mortirolo stage at the Giro was AWESOME…
On your point - I would be shocked to see Jan in trouble on the Croix de Fer on that stage at the Tour - he & CSC will have too many strong climbers to let a big attack get away and Basso won’t attack with two climbs to go. It will probably be more like what happened this past year to Briancon with two or three guys hanging off the front but never by more then a few minutes…
There is an excellent discussion about Jan Ullrich in the latest Velonews TDF special. Essentially, those who know the sport well discuss how Jan has been coddled over the years by his guru/entourage so much that he has never developed the killer instinct necessary to win year in and year out. He also seems utterly incapable of making the sacrifices necessary to beat his more disciplined rivals. I remember reading a few years ago that Lance would spend a lot of his training time on his TT bike, just to get used to the handling, position, etc. Rudy Pevenage (Jan’s Svengali) deemed this unneccesary. Jan ONLY rode his TT bike in races. Makes you wonder if he might have won more of the head to head TT races he had with lance if he was better prepared…
Yeah, maybe if Jan could handle his TT bike, he’d have taken Lance at the 2003 TdF when he hit the tarmac on the rain soaked negative banked roundabout!
Thas pretty funny that Jan is" a lot like us" except for a TDF bowl, a couple three Olympic Medals, a half dozen National Championships and some rainbow stripes. Remember he is a Product of the big Sky Blue East German machine, so I bet he has had the pleasure of some suffering at a young age. I also bet his natural weight is probably 10 kilos heavier than where he is racing as well. Jan has had a few bumps in his racing, but the sad part is that if Lance wouldn’t have gotten cancer, he would have had a couple more Tour wins, and if Lance would have not been able to come back from cancer probably at least 4 Tour wins. He was like a lot of riders that were born under an era of a total giant. How do you think the poor guys that grew up with Big Eddy felt?
With the rant over I think Jan will have one bad day and put him on the podium, but not the top. I think Levi could have the same fate. And does not have the team to protect him, in my opinion. No way Mayo even gets on the podium as the orange guys have seemed to ride backwards in July the last few years.
I had my pick as Floyd, but now with the team in a tight spot, I am not too sure he has the guns to get him thru the tough spots. CSC looks like the class of the outfit, but I sometimes worry about Basso holdng on for that long, but boy do they ever ride nice as a team. Somehow Discovery always come with all guns going off together at the Tour. I don’t think it will be George, but someone from them should podium. I personally think this may be the most exciting Tour in the last 4 years anyway. I really liked Lances show for three years, then it sort of got old.
No one is doubting Jan’s palmares. But if you take all that aside, he is more human than robot. This is why he has so many fans. I have to totally agree with you that the Lance show was fun for 3-4 years, but after that the TdF got a bit boring. Last year, the most exciting day in bike racing was the second last stage of the Giro. That stage was a lot of fun to follow as a fan. It was cool how Salvodelli saved his Giro with an incredible descent closing the time gap just enough to hold off Simoni. Hopefully we will see this type of stuff happen on the TdF. It would be cool though it they broke from tradition and perhaps had mtn stages up to the final Friday, and maybe do like 1989 and have a TT to the Arc de Triomphe, keeping the final results a bit up in the air till the final meters.
I agree with that, the Giro has been really great to watch in the past few years and the Tour has gotten sort of ho hum. Interesting how crazy the Italian riders get in the Giro and except for B Day the French are pretty quiet in the Tour.
The problem for the French is that the Americans, Spanish, Austalians and Germans have made the Tour de France their personal territory. The Giro is still an Italian race with some foreign interluders. In the past decade the other cycling powers have only used the Giro as a training race. If Basso can pull off the double, perhaps other riders from elsewhere will start using it as more of a tune up.
I was riding with a buddy of mine this morning (ST guy Allan Faulds). We were joking about Jan “the big German” and it occurred to us, that although Jan is considered big, he’d look fairly average by triathlon standards. Certainly no clydesdale.
