Relay Race
By JoE Silva

If a certain amount of anticipation had set sail from the Tour de France in 2008, it made port in the principality of Monaco just in time for an Independence Day start just one year later. Manufactured or otherwise, the drama surrounding this event was undeniable. Alberto Contador, who had waited 706 days since he was crowned on the Champs-Élysées, had finally returned to the Tour de France.

But Lance Armstrong, the man who had returned to the sport and stood as a potential spoiler to Contador’s dreams of winning once more, brought more drama to the first 2009 stage by simply starting the kickoff time trial early. The threat of rain compelled Armstrong and Leipheimer to move around their times on the starting roster. The Americans wanted to avoid the possibility of wet, windy roads interfering with their individual times, and potentially the leadership of the team. 

The up and down, winding makeup of the 15.5km course meant that there wasn’t really any way to keep up a steady rhythm throughout the course. Efforts would have to be calculated just so, and the word was that Lance had test rode the route more than 30 times before he ever saw the official start house. Relaxed, even waving at the crowd before he went down the ramp, the question hung in the air whether Armstrong was beginning a campaign towards an unthinkable Tour win number eight.

When Lance motored around the course, the scenery was nothing short of stunning.  Ahead of him Maxime Monfort of the newly rechristened Columbia-HTC had put up the best time of the day, but riding through one frenzied channel of fans after another Lance burst past the Belgian by 30.40 seconds to finish at 20:12. The Texan again confirmed that he was in it to win it and brought the form to back up his mission statement.

That time wouldn’t hold for long though. Monfort’s teammate Tony Martin bested Armstrong by 7 seconds and then the man who had trained alongside him a couple of weeks beforehand in Colorado, put himself way deep into the hurt box as he came down from the Cote de Beau Soleil to do the same. Levi Leipheimer, a longstanding TT power horse, threw up a new best time of 20:02 on a bike that he’d only been riding for three days. The Tour of California champion sat in the pole position for the majority of the day until the baton was passed to another man on the Kazakh squad…Andreas Klöden.

Klöden, who is rides under a cloud of doping allegations, became the first man to go under the 20-minute mark, but some of the big guns were still waiting to roll. Bradley Wiggins brought some much-needed joy to the Garmin-Slipstream squad by putting in a phenomenal time and unseating Kloden. That left it up to Contador to out do his fellow teammates and claim the mantle of leadership of the Astana squad, and that’s exactly what he did.

Contador, resplendent in his Spanish national time trial championship skin suit notched what would be the best intermediate time of the day. He arrived at the 7.5km intermediate time check at 11:22, locking in the polka dot jersey of the King of the Mountains. Unfortunately for the man who’s won all three grand tours, Fabian Cancellara was moving so fast on course that he eventually swept up the man who started 1:30 in front of him – 2009 Giro winner Denis Menchov. Cancellara, who was able to win the Tour of California prologue with the flu, was back at the top of his game. The Swiss dynamo left Menchov literally behind, and did the same time-wise to Cadel Evans, and 2008 Tour champion Carlos Sastre. Cancellara’s time of 19:32 was 18.5 seconds faster than Contador, breaking Astana’s relay race hold on the first time trial and once again finding himself in the first yellow jersey of the Tour.

Tomorrow, 187km separate Monaco and the finishing city of Brignoles. It’s a bumpy ride, but not too bumpy to prevent the sprinters’ team from getting their first taste of glory.