In the last ten days I moved from Virginia to Indiana and then flew back to Italy; I also experienced several health problems. I still managed to watch the Wimbledon finals and keep up with Le Tour, but "real life" has a bad habit of interfering with my sports-watching! Damn you, real life. I don't expect to update this blog very much in the next week, either, as health problems continue, but surely by the time the Olympics roll around I'll be back in shape and live-blogging the crap out of London 2012!
Meanwhile, at La Grande Boucle, Bradley Wiggins is still very much in control of the yellow jersey. Not that there's been much actual competition. For the second year in a row, the Tour organizers planned a very non-threatening route with little altitude and relatively easy stages. Add to that there are over 100 km worth of time-trial stages, and Wiggins' victory is served. Neither Evans nor Nibali, who are currently Wiggins' top adversaries, are capable of topping the Brit in time trials. Wiggins, like Miguel Indurain a couple of decades ago, doesn't just do well in time trials: he wins them, hands down; and as long as the Tour is structured to favor that particular skill set, there will be no real competition.
That is not to say that Wiggins doesn't do well in climbs, for he's definitely hard to leave behind in the mountains. But that's because of two reasons: 1) There aren't any real climbs in this Tour, with only a handful of HC climbs, all placed early in their respective stages, and a mere two mountain arrivals, neither very challenging; 2) Wiggins can count on his Team Sky, which is made up of riders that would be captains in any other team, like Froome, Porte, and Boasson Hagen. So you can't really say that Wiggins is a fabulous stage racer. He's a fabulous stage racer in an easy Tour where he's counting on a killer team. These, after all, were the skills he had showcased at the Criterium du Dauphine last month and that we were waiting for him to confirm at the Tour now, so no surprises.
I insist on all these qualifiers is that in the last few years we hae seen stellar performances by riders who were all-around fabulous stage racers, such as Contador and Schleck. The 2009 and 2010 Tours were among the most exciting I have ever seen, and from this standpoint last year's and this year's have come nowhere close. If I were to be malignant, I would say that the Tour organizers are waiting for Contador's (unfair) punishment to expire and for him to return next year. If that is right, the 2013 Grande Boucle will be awesome. But we'll see.
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