Although raced over three weeks, the Tour De France is generally decided in the five or six mountain stages of the Alps and the Pyrenees. For these stages, the sprinters who dominated the first ten days of racing just aim to survive and the overall contenders who have been hiding in the Peleton come out to fight.

Everything went by the form sheet in the Pyrenees and on into the Alps with the ascent of Alpe D’Huez. However, on Wednesdays final climb of La Toussuire the Tour Leader (Floyd Landis) hit the wall 10km from the finish. Losing 1min/ km over his rivals he was eventually lead over the line by his team make Axel Mercx.

So, with the favourite to win overall crushed back into 11th place over 8 minutes behind it was down to the final alpine stage to finally shake out the positions for Paris. As normal I was following the start of the race via letour.fr/ eurosport.com and expected fairly normal tactics for a stage with a 1000m (vertical) climb at the end – a few riders would break away while the main contenders would roll through the stage until the last ascent where all hell would break loose and the last man standing would take the stage.

However, on the first of the climbs the whole Phonak team came to the front of the peloton, wound the pace up until everyone one was suffering and then, with 127km to go, Floyd Landis rode off the front. It was obvious that he had seriously lost it, trying to force an insane chase over the cols which would break him and everyone who tried to follow. Apparently, the leaders of the teams also thought the same and let him go, expecting to hoover him up a pass or two later.

Floyd however had other plans, with a combination of awesome climbing1, necking bottles of water & tipping them over his head2 in equal measure, and lemming-like descending he took a maximum lead of 9 minutes and at the finish still retained 7, only loosing time on the 20km flat approach to the foot of the Joux – Plane3.

From eleventh with a deficit of 8′ 08″, he now sits in third just 30″ behind, and should (baring alien abduction, which I am not discounting) time trial back into the Yellow Jersey on Saturday.

After the Alpe, the French Press were saying ‘Landis has Yellow but where is the class?’ I wonder what they were saying today.

  1. Breaking Patrik Sinkewitz with an uphill acceleration while taking a drink ↑
  2. It is possible that he overheated on La Toussuire ↑
  3. The peloton will normally take 1min/ 10km on the flat over a solo rider ↑

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