These Are The Breaks
By JoE Silva

As refreshing as it is to see a break of worthy riders survive the 12th day of racing at this year’s Tour de France, who amongst the Tour de France organizers thought it was a sound idea to put three essentially flat stages one right after the other? It’s not like their weren’t semi-significant developments – Mark Cavendish (Columbia-HTC) winning two out of those three events and closing in on his goal of keeping the green Points jersey is important, but the snooze factor was extremely high.

It’s understandable that many cities and town vie for the chance to host an a stage start or finish, and that the organizers have to maximize the demand for Tour stops, but what we’ve seen over the past few days hasn’t made for interesting racing. Perhaps that was the reason that momentary ban on race radios was instituted – as a means of spicing up an otherwise ho hum stage, but if that was the tactic then it was a miserable experiment. Tomorrow’s stage into Colmar, a hilly 200km run should restore the Tour’s excitement on the route’s own merit, was also supposed to feature a ban on radios. All of the whining, however, that was sent up from the rider/director side of the race has triumphed and the race will be run in the standard fashion. It’s a shame to think that organizers caved so quickly, as it could have been ample pay back for what Tour fans have had to endure over the past few days.

Instead of the potential for some real tactical chaos what we should see is either a one day specialist a la Kim Kirchen get away as long as he doesn’t shed too much of the 3:16 that separates him from the yellow jersey or a break being pulled back in the final kilometers- the former being a result of the finish line being a full 20.km from the final climb. Once over the top of that effort, the Cat 1 ascent up the Col du Firstplan, it’s a sharp drop and a reasonable flat run into Colmar. Our GC riders will have to keep their eyes and ears open to avoid something horribly wrong.

There are some sprint points on the road as well as some valuable king of the mountains points to be had apart from the stage win. Egoi Martinez (Euskaltel – Euskadi) holds only a 17 point lead over Liquigas rider Franco Pellizotti, so both of their squads will want to position them accordingly unless a non-threatening break goes away quickly to sweep up those points. Cavendish remains in the green jersey, but only by 10 points. Expect him to keep an eagle eye on any movement by principal rival Thor Hushovd.

So by all accounts, stage 13 should be a thing to enjoy, and enjoy it you should, before stage 14 comes along and threatens to induce sleep again with another day for the sprinters. Zzzzz…