The Best Tour For Years

For people who don't like cycling the idea that somebody can be praised and eulogised over for winning the coveted Green Jersey whilst finishing over an hour or so behind the winner of the even more coveted Yellow Jersey remains something of a mystery. Cycling isn't unique in that respect, we enjoy the Marathon but our heroes are the Michael Johnson's and Steve Ovett's, the Premiership title race is interesting but the Champions League Final is a bigger draw. Watching somebody accelerate from 30 miles an hour to nearly 45 miles an hour into a headwind over the last three hundred metres of a three week race is still for me the hairs on the back of the neck moment.

This was a classic Tour De France, possibly the best I have seen in some thirty years of watching the race. In previous years, with the exception of the 8 second race, the winner has been decided days before the final celebratory laps of Paris, this year (as I had predicted on a messageboard)  it came down to the time trial on the final Friday and again, as predicted, it was Cadel Evans who won both the time trial and the yellow jersey.

Evans had finished second twice and at 34 years old became the oldest winner of the Tour since World War Two, his final winning margin was a mere 94 seconds, which after three weeks of racing was extraordinary. Andy Schleck came second (again) with his brother Frank in third place. The real hero for many was the French rider Tommy Voeckler who held onto the Yellow Jersey for ten days and finally relinquished it just two days before the final stage.

Mark Cavendish took his total number of stage wins to 20 and is now seventh on the all-time list of stage wins in the race, he became the first Briton to win the Green Jersey (awarded on the basis of most points gained for the various sprints) and the first cyclist in tour history to win the final stage on the Champs three years in succession. 

One of the big rumours of the sporting summer has been the move of Cav from HTC Highroad to Sky. The transfer window in professional cycling opens on 1st August and I can't really see how a move would benefit the 'Manx Missile'. He will move to a team that already has an outstanding sprinter in Edvald Boasson Hagen (somebody who incidentally moved to Sky to get out of Cav's considerable shadow) and unless he can take Mark Renshaw, Matt Goss and  Bernie Eisel with him I don't see what advantage there would be - apart from more money of course. 

I wasn't there this year to see Cav cross the line ahead of the peloton, due to a combination of various circumstances, but hopefully my elbows can renew their acquaintance with the cold steel of the Parisian barriers next July.