With the 2009 Tour de France only one week away, the riders face one of the most spectacular routes in recent years. Several key differences present themselves in the route this year that have not been featured in the past.
The Team Time Trial returns along with Lance Armstrong, the event last seen in Armstrong's final 2005 Tour win. The Tour's penultimate stage is no longer a decisive time trial, but rather a road stage finishing on the brutal, exposed climb up the Mont Ventoux.
As mentioned in another article on this site, Stages 10 and 13 are going to be run without race radios, leaving the riders to use their experience and instinct rather than the informed eyes of their team directors following in the cars speaking to the riders on a constant basis.
The Astana team is back after a one-year hiatus, and is packed with a powerhouse team, featuring 2007 winner Alberto Contador, Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and Andreas Kloden.
Several key stages animate the 2009 edition of the Tour. Immediately starting the race is a 15-kilometer time trial. It is not the normal "prologue" time-trial because it is longer than the 8-kilometer-or-less prologue.
This will be long enough to open up some noticeable gaps right from the start. Look for Saxobank's powerhouse time-triallist Fabian Cancellara to animate the stage and take the first yellow jersey.
For the general classification, newly-crowned Spanish TT champ Alberto Contador (Astana) will already be looking to put time into direct rivals Cadel Evans (Silence-Lotto), Carlos Sastre (Cervelo), and Denis Menchov (Rabobank).
The Stage Four team time trial will be the next major hurdle for the classification riders. The event was last seen in 2005 when Armstrong's Discovery Channel team won the day. This year, though, there is a major difference.
In past years, losses were limited to a maximum of 20 seconds from one finishing place to the next, regardless of actual winning margins. This was to prevent the leaders of weaker teams from being put of of contention before the race even got rolling. No longer.
No limits on time losses will be observed; the time the teams achieve will be what they get. Weaker teams that do poorly in the team event will be put into serious jeopardy, as their team leaders might suffer severe losses before arriving at the mountains.
Making it a true team effort, the official team time is measured on the fifth team rider (out of nine) to cross the line.
Stage Seven sees the first mountaintop finish. This is only the second time that the Tour will finish in Andorra, and the last time this finish was used, it produced surprising results.
In 1997, when Armstrong's most famous rival, Jan Ullrich, won the stage, he beat the pure climbers, instead using his muscular heft to motor up the climb.
This climb might cause time differences, it might not, but it will provide a springboard for one of the overall challengers to launch an attack to gain time.
Stages 10 and 13 will be run without radios as an experiment on returning to older methods of racing. Increasingly, some have become annoyed that races have become too predictable.
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