Tour de France – Stage 10
Yet another long stage, this time it was between Tallard and Marseille with a total of 229.5 km of seriously high speed over the hills towards Marseille. It was also a day that a breakaway contained the lead all the way to the finish. The group was composed by riders which were no treat to the overall standings and we saw a great race to the finish line.
The riders was : Cedric Vasseur, Sandy Casar, Michael Albasini, Patrice Halgand, Jens Voigt, Staf Scheirlinckx, Paolo Bossoni, Marcus Burghardt, Aleksandr Kuschynski, Juan Antonio Flecha and Andriy Grivko. The group split up around the 35km mark and split up again around the 25km mark. A lot of attacking was going on and mind games were in effect.
Patrice Halgand was the most aggressive rider in the breakaway with a lot of attacks, but Jens Voigt, which just can’t stop himself from putting the hammer down and chase the others, was always eager to catch any attacks.
In the peloton it was Rabobank who controlled the pace of the pack and within the final 5km it was more and more the sprinter teams that set the pace, like they always do. Even if the peloton’s first rider across the finishline was some 10 minutes behind the winner Cedric Vasseur, it was still a mad dash to the finish line, which is always nice to see.
One thing that is really interesting about today’s winner, besides it was the first French victory in the 2007 Tour de France and the 3rd for Quickstep-Innergetic, was the fact that it was numerology at play. Do you want to know why ? Well you see it was 10 years ago Cedric Vasseur won his first stage win in the Tour de France and it was also at the 10km mark he made an attack and he was 10 minutes 36 seconds ahead of the peloton and it all happened on the 10th stage of the 2007 Tour de France. That is numerology at play, if you believe in it !
But the stage was somewhat blackend by Patrik Sinkewitz who failed a drug test, but more on that and my view on Doping you can find in Stupid Things, later on today.
I’ll be back tomorrow with my view on the 11th stage.
funny to see that the name sinkewitz turns up only at the end of your text – everybody in germany is talking about nothing else but him and his team and the end of live coverage on tv…
The reason for that is because i’ve written a post under the section Stupid Things were it is all dedicated to Doping and Patrik “Stinkewitz” Sinkewitz.
I didn’t want my view on the race itself to be blackend by Stinkewitz doping test. Keeping that stuff seperate.