Velochimp: Astrochimp on Cycling

( pic from Yahoo sports)

Where oh where is Tom Boonen in the sprint stages in the Tour de France this year? He is either out of position or coming in after the winner. The World Champion made it look so easy earlier this year as he was running undefeated in the first few stages of the Tour of Qatar back in February. Now Boonen is without a win after two ripe tomato sprint stages.

So far after two sprint stages we have one victory by Jimmy Casper and one by Robbie McEwen. The Casper win was unusual in that the finishing sprint was pretty much a free-for-all. The most amazing part of the sprint was seeing Tom Boonen pull out so early that he had to abort his sprint. It seemed as if Boonen was the leadout out someone else rather than getting launched himself.

In stage two, the sprint was again a free-for-all with Lampre forming a mini train to launch Daniele Bennati for the win. Robbie McEwen found his way out of the shuffle and beat a surging Boonen.

The expulsion of Basso, Ullrich and the lack of presence of AleJet Petacchi has made the final run in sprint stages very chaotic. There is no team controlling the pace, just a mix of intrested teams, but not one dominant team that has the horsepower to pull the peloton along and shut down any possible last minute attacks. A train lead peloton is perfect for a Boonen/Petacchi type rider as they take full advantage of a long and fast leadout. The chaotic nature of these sprints so far has called for a faster twitch sketchy type rider with good bike handling skills which describes Robbie McEwen well.

No team has been able to form a good sprinter’s train, but Quick-Step was developing their own sprinter train to rival Petacchi’s and even took former members of Fassa Bortolo into the team this year for that purpose. So far there has been no Treno Blu at the front of the peloton. But as Boonen describes to cyclingnews.com, it is hard enough just to try and get the train moving.

“Four or five times we tried to get our train going,” Boonen told Sporza. “Every time someone mingled and disturbed the process. It was complete chaos in Strasbourg. There also was a bad head wind and too many corners in the last kilometres. We just didn’t succeed and then I was on my own.” – cyclingnews.com

Come on, did you ever hear Petacchi say that his team could not get the train going because other riders would interfere? No, those guys would just bounce out any rider that was not part of the train. Hmm, maybe he shouldn’t use Rujano as his leadout man for the rest of the Tour?