Luxembourg’s Le Quotidien has a good piece on how to beat Wiggins, asking several team managers for their suggestions
Whilst Wiggins is the great favourite for the race I think the next three weeks can bring plenty of surprises. But let’s run with the idea that Wiggins is the rider to beat, here are the suggestions from the team managers plus some extra ideas.
You can now download summary details of the Tour de France for your electronic diary on a phone or computer: inrngTourDeFranceCalendar.ics.
It looks like the perfect picture for a cycling team. A smiling rider stands tall on the podium, dressed in yellow with the team logos in evidence as the girls hold their pose for the cameras. Even his sunglasses are perched just right on the team-issue baseball cap. But there’s something wrong with the picture.
I’m not talking about the composition of the image. You might notice the podium girls haven’t zipped up their jerseys fully but it’s not that. No, the problem here is that Radioshack-Nissan’s Jakob Fuglsang has won a race and bizarrely this could prove damaging for the interests of his team.
The odds on Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France are now so short that the some bookmakers price him as a safer pick than Lance Armstrong in 2003. Cadel Evans is a close second but as the table above from oddschecker.com shows, everyone else is far out. Madness?
Possibly and we should note that the odds are a price and not a probability, it is likely that a lot of people have been putting a lot of money on Evans and Wiggins and this has shortened the odds. But precision apart, Wiggins and Evans are the two prime contenders. Who are the others capable of finishing on the podium?
Eric Boyer has had happier times in July. That’s him in the picture “reaching out” to a fan on the last stage of the 1992 Tour de France. This year he faces sitting at home after being fired as manager of the Cofidis team.
The Saxo Bank team unveiled a new co-sponsor today: Tinkoff Bank. The team will now be called Saxo Bank – Tinkoff Bank, a mouthful that will be awkward to pronounce and type.
It marks the return of Oleg Tinkov to the sport. A Russian entrepreneur, he is a lively character with a past unlike almost anyone else in the sport.
It’s the weekend of the national championships across Europe. Whilst America, Asia and Australia have different weekends, pretty much everywhere in Europe sees simultaneous national championships. In some European countries these races can take on a strange feel with several teams of 25 riders starting, making the tactics completely different from your usual race.
The organiser of the Giro d’Italia Michele Acquarone has a blog on cyclingnews.com and his latest piece opens the floor to thoughts on the 2012 edition, the route and the racing. It’s good PR, opening up to the fans and seeking ideas. We’ll see what the response is and in time whether any thoughts are taken aboard by the “Pink Admiral”*
I don’t know if he’s a reader but Acquarone raises some interesting points about the Giro and the nature of racing. To summarise the last 100 years of cycle sport in a sentence we’ve seen races shorten in distance, the epic tests of 400km a day with dawn starts and gravel roads are gone and today pro cycling remains a gruelling test of endurance but it is increasingly defined by television.
A quick note to say you can now read a Tour de France guide on here: inrng.com/tour.
Each stage is analysed, each jersey is explained and once more information is available there will be full list of riders and other content that’ll be updated every day so you can dip in and out during the next few weeks.