Jun 23, 2006
Tour Overanalysis
With a little more than a week to go for the Tour de France, cycling news and cycling blog sites are getting a bit overzealous with their pre Tour analysis. It is a long two week run from the end of the Tour de Suisse to the start of the Tour de France next Saturday. In the meantime speculation about duels between Bjarne Riis and Johan Bruynel are running wild.
Podium Cafe a fine news/blog site has some overanalysis based on the most recent issue of Cycle Sport.
..has Bruyneel been using the entire season to lay a trap for Basso and Riis at the Tour? Consider, the two biggest weakness for Basso are his never having been in yellow (and taken responsibility for it), and his need to expend himself in the Giro. For his part, Riis had never won anything much before this year as a DS, and had blown his first real shot at a grand tour in last year’s Giro… to Discovery.
Meanwhile, Discovery are being extremely cagey about their own plans, giving Riis no real target to aim at. They have four plausible leaders, with little leaks aimed at giving the impression that Hincapie is their first choice. Could they be playing possum again? Is Popovych — whom nobody talks about — quietly building his form for the real run? Did Savolodelli back off in the Giro, claiming “allergies,” when in fact he was holding back from a futile effort to save some strength for the Tour, a course that suits him?
Not bad points at all, but consider that Popovich has not done very well in any Grand Tour overall. Lance Armstrong at least had a test run at the 1998 Vuelta before deciding to win the Tour de France. Popovych still needs to experience riding as a team leader. The Tour de France is not the place to learn, but the wide open competition could give Popy an opening. I don’t believe for a second that Hincapie is a GC contender. I agree that he is mostly a prop. One mountain stage win does not make you ready to take over as GC leader. Jens Voight gave away a victory to Juan Manuel Garate in the Giro’s toughest stage, but you don’t see Voight talking of going for a GC win in the Giro next year.
Salvodelli is probably the secret weapon in the Discovery stable. Bruyneel mentioned during the Giro that the Tour fits Savoldelli abilities better than the Giro. Savoldelli has been very low key since the Giro and he does know how to handle the role of team leader.
Next Pez Cycling News a very fine cycling news site has a different take on the Ullrich TT win in the Giro.
But Ullrich’s win had many astonished cycling fans overlooking an important detail – Ivan Basso actually beat Ullrich in both of the last two time checks clipping 14 seconds off Jan in the final 22 kms. Did Ullrich lose form in the second half of the TT? Or did Bjarne Riis, knowing that Basso had the Giro won, have something up his sleeve? Something like giving Ullrich a false sense of confidence with respect to Basso’s TT abilities, setting Jan up for a takedown in July?
Reads very similar to Podium Cafe’s overanalysis, but with Basso and Ullrich instead. I don’t think much can be read into the Giro TT since Basso and Ullrich were at different points of fitness and each had a different goal in mind. Basso ran the TT without worrying about Jan Ullrich. As long as Basso beat his GC adversaries thats all that matters, why go the extra distance to try and beat Ullrich? Jan Ullrich was gaining form and showed that he was at top speed at the time. The course was pancake flat and Jan averaged 51km/h meaning that he was cooking. Can Jan go faster? probably not since that is a very good top speed for a long flat TT. Jan’s weight would not make as much difference in the flats compared to a hillier TT.
Now for Velochimp’s overanalysis
Basso has claimed that he could lose up to four minutes to Der Kaiser in the TTs. I cannot see Basso losing that much time to Ullrich. Basso has shown improved form this year in the TTs, and the difference in the Giro between Basso and Ullrich was small. But after two months many factors change so The Giro TT is not a good barometer of who is best. To do that, we have to take a look at last year
Last year there were two individual time trials that totalled 65km. In the the final 46km TT of the Tour, a TT where Basso started well but finished badly, Basso finished 1:31 behind Ullrich. In the stage one 19km TT Basso finished 18 seconds behind Ullrich. So taking last years numbers that would put Basso behind Ullrich by 1:48 after 65km.
Clearly Basso has improved in the TTs and his CSC team includes riders such as Zabriske and Julich who ride the course and report back ont he conditions for their team leader. T-Mobile has not been known to do that in the past.
But how much did Basso improve last year? in 2004 there was a 55km Time Trial on stage 19. Ullrich placed second while Basso placed sixth 1:49 behind.
What is Basso’s net loss from the last two years in the TTs?
2004 55km TTs difference 1:49 -> 1.98 seconds per kilometer
2005 65km TTs difference 1:48 -> 1.66 seconds per kilometer
Net improvement of .32 seconds per kilometer
Lets assume that Basso will continue to improve by .32 seconds /kilometer as he did last year.
That would give us a rate of loss of 1.34 multiplied by 100km divided by 60 gives us 2:23.
2006 100km TTs difference 2:23 -> 1.34 seconds per kilometer
Clearly not the four minutes that Basso was claiming in a recent press conference, but much less than many would think. This is of course based on a rate of improvement similar to last year assuming that Basso gets faster and Ullrich stays the same. The actual numbers may vary during the TTs and I could even expect Basso to pull a radical improvement and actually beat Ullrich.
The difference will be in the mountains where Basso showed he performs well. Next up will be the moutain stage analysis.