The last time he raced Cancellara over a similar distance at the Tour, in 2005, the Texan was a minute faster than the Swiss. Contador was nearly 2 minutes slower than Armstrong that day. On Saturday, Contador was 22 seconds quicker—but he is 11 years younger, too.
SHOOT: His strengths lie in his team, as a tactician. Is he the strongest rider in the Tour? No, but evidently not far from it, which means he is a contender. In cycling it's not always the strongest who wins, but the smartest. In
Le Tour though, strength and fitness counts for a lot, especially in the mountains.
This is a great article on Lance, check it out.
The bottom line: on Saturday, Armstrong rode his worst time trial at the Tour since the cancer-survivor first took the race by the scruff of the neck in 1999.
He placed—gasp!—10th. There’s dozens of guys at the Tour who would give their paychecks to be that good and 170 of them—most of them years his junior — finished behind him.
Armstrong was only 40 seconds slower than the winner, Fabian Cancellara, the Olympic champion in this intense, technical discipline of racing against the clock.
In building his record string of seven Tour wins from 1999-2005, Armstrong competed in 19 time trials and won 11 of them. He placed no worse than third in all the others except one—a short clock-race in Paris at the start of the 2003 Tour, where he was seventh.
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1 comment:
He is gonna get it. I think the first stage was a wake up call and now is is waking up and getting used to it again. He should take this year's tour and will likely be the topic of conversation for a long time to come.
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