Tour To Go Down To The Wire After Sastre Produces L'Aple d'Huez Miracle

Bravo Carlos Sastre! Knowing he needed major time over his rivals, more accomplished in the time trial caper, Spanish climber Carlos Sastre produced a performance for the ages on the mythical climb to L'Alpe d'Huez. Hitting the bottom of the Alpe alongside his GC rivals, Sastre wasted no time in attacking. After surging away from the field in the first couple of kilometres of the climb, Sastre put on a feat of climbing that will go down in Tour history as one of the greatest individual performances of all time. At the summit, some 14 km's later, Sastre had built a two minute buffer over the rest of the field and surged to the top of the General Classification. In another Tour marred by drug controversy, the sight of Sastre climbing into the heavens with everything on the line will have warmed the hearts of cycling purists around the globe.

The rest of the overall contenders finished basically together, but none of them could match the epic performance of Sastre. With the Schleck brothers causing havoc like a couple of school boys in the yellow jersey group, the chase could never really gather momentum, and it was up to Cadel Evans to drag the rest of the field up to Sastre over the closing 3 km's in order to limit his losses to something he may be able to overturn in the final time trial. No one helped him and by the end they had all lost over 2 minutes to the Spaniard. Sastre now holds the yellow jersey by 84 seconds from Frank Schleck. Bernhard Kohl is at 93 seconds, with Evans at 94, and Denis Menchov at 2 minutes 39 seconds.

The result leaves the race on tenterhooks. We now seem to have a race in two - Evans v Sastre. The question being is Sastre's 94 second lead enough to hold off Evans over Saturday's exceptionally long 53km time trial. Sastre lost 76 seconds to Evans in the first time trial, a much shorter 29.5km affair, but he did finish in the top 30 on the stage so he is by no means a muppet against the clock. On a normal stage I would expect Evans to put at least 2 minutes into Sastre in a time trial of this length, but Saturday will not be a normal stage. Riders in yellow have a habit of over performing in the final time trial, just as Alberto Contador did last year when in theory Evans should have been able to claw back sufficient time to steal the maillot jaune from him. I am expecting a similar above average performance from Sastre on Saturday.

For that reason I see the probabilities of either rider taking this years tour as 60-40 in favour of Evans, although betting markets will most likely have Evans much shorter. Sastre will have the advantage of having Evans times to ride too which may allow him to limit his losses to an mount that still leaves him with the yellow jersey for the ride into Paris. Frank Schleck and Kohl do not have enough of a buffer of Evans and will slip below him in the GC. The wild card is Menchov, who would expect to move onto the podium given his time-trialling ability, and with a miracle performance would be an outside hope at taking the title in Paris. In summary, my prediction for the final podium in Paris is currently: Cadel Evans - Carlos Sastre - Denis Menchov.

In the other classifications there was again no change to the points competition with all the sprinters finishing in the groupetto. Bernhard Kohl increased his lead in the King of the Mountains competition to a seemingly unassailable 45 points, with Sastre's efforts on L'Alpe seeing him climb to second in the competition, equal on points with Frank Schleck. The race for the White Jersey has been reduced to two riders. Again Vincenzo Nabali lost time on the day's climbs, allowing Andy Schleck to increase his lead in the competition to 1 minute 58 seconds, from Tour de Suisse winner Roman Kreuziger.

Yellow Jersey - Carlos Sastre
Green Jersey - Oscar Freire
Polka Dot Jersey - Bernhard Kohl
White Jersey - Andy Schleck