Ho, hum. Another break, another chase, another catch, another sprint. Cha-ching. Pay the little man with the big mouth and even bigger legs, please.
The same ol’, same ol’, will not apply beyond Sunday, however. The Tour is headed for the Alps, and while the conventional wisdom is that the race will not be won there, it certainly may be lost there.
VeloNews editor at large John Wilcockson, who has covered some eleventy-seven Tours, has tagged Big Tex as the man to watch, writing, “Everyone here is saying that the Texan is looking much stronger than last year. …”
As for Tex his own bad self, he says coyly, “I would look for more animation in my tactics.”
Well, yeah. If I were 50 seconds behind Alberto Contador going into the mountains I’d want to pump it up a notch or two or three. Maybe have Janez Brajkovic park himself on El Pistolero’s wheel and chatter away breezily in Slovenian. “Jebo te bog! Zdaj se boš pa še opravičeval!” (“God will fuck you! Now you’ll really be sorry!”)
Of course, eventually you have to catch and pass those two 20-something hill-climbing sonsabitches. But that’s another story, one yet to be written.
Mad Blog Media 