Riders & Teams

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Riders & Teams

Remember that the reason for this exercise is to teach you about bike racing and how to analyze a race. This is meant to teach you how to think a race through. Anyone can get lucky and guess who will win a race but it takes study, thought, and research to even reasonably guess the top five placings in an event. Plus it is meant for fun and to challenge you and let you see how much you really know about the sport. Enjoy.

There are a number of powerful teams in the Tour this year with a lot of strong stage racing muscle but I believe that the best chances of winning the Tour this year are USP, ONCE, Saeco, and Euskaltel with several strong chasers in the pack including Telekom and Bianchi. I believe the latter are dark horses in this race because of the questionable shape of Botero and Ullrich a few weeks before the race. There are also a number of teams which have increased their racing muscle and can make things more difficult for USP including Telekom, Vini Caldirola, Gerolsteiner, Cofidis, Rabobank, Alessio, and iBanesto.com. There should be even better team battles this year.

Some of the team changes which should make this year's race more competitive and interesting are that (1) when Saeco couldn't get into the Tour last year with Cipo as their primary focus, they were forced to change their strategy to GC racing instead of riding for stage wins and (2) Euskaltel appears to have been working on increasing the riders' individual time trialing and possibly also their team time trialing which is what put them out of the competition early in their first two years of competing in the Tour.

US Postal

USP is still riding strong with Lance as the race favorite and they have made some changes adding Beltran for additional support in the mountains and team time trial. My concern is that Lance lost the race in the mountains to Mayo by 10 seconds at the Dauphine and was forced to win the race in the time trial. This makes me question as to whether he is off climbing form slightly, is Mayo that much stronger in the mountains, or was Lance not trying that hard? Another thing is that we don't hear Carmichael boasting that Lance is stronger than ever. We will soon find out and this is a very important question.

ONCE

ONCE is still consistently the strongest team in the world and I expect them to have a strong chance of winning the team time trial giving Beloki and Azevedo a slight time advantage. This advantage will be decreased by losing Galdeano who finished in the top five last year and could cause them to lose the team time trial stage to USP or Telekom. I couldn't find an example of Beloki's and Azevedo's racing performances within a month of the Tour so I have to extrapolate their performances from last year. The team seems to be riding well this year and should be there for them.

Saeco

Saeco was always a powerful team but, with their new focus on GC racing, they will now present a serious threat for USP on GC. They just came from winning the Giro and have a number of good time trialists which should help them do well in the team time trial keeping Simoni in competition. One question here is how well will they do in the team time trial. My best guess is that they should be close enough to give Simoni a reasonable chance of being competitive. This will toss another hat in the Yellow Jersey ring making the race more fun.

Euskaltel

A potentially huge surprise for this year will be the Euskaltel team with a greatly improved Mayo beating Lance in the mountains at the Dauphine and only losing about 1.27 to Lance in the time trial. That makes him very competitive for the Yellow Jersey. A few of the other riders on the team seem to have improved their time trialing considerably which makes me think their coach has been working on improving the team's time trialing to keep from losing five minutes for his top riders in the team time trial. This did not show at the Tour du Catalunya where the Euskaltel team finished very poorly in the team time trial but only two of those riders made the Tour team. If Euskaltel can keep their loses to less than two minutes in the team time trial, Mayo could be in this race for Yellow and will definitely finish in the top five. It will be interesting to see how well Euskaltel will do in this stage and it will be an important race.

Remember that last year, Botero finished fourth in the Tour after his team lost him over five minutes in the team time trial. Mayo is riding at least as strong as Botero last year and, if the coach made the right move by building their time trialing as a team while also improving their climbing, then Mayo is a man to watch.

Telekom

I am throwing Telekom into this mix because of Botero. We must keep this man in mind. He lost over five minutes in the team time trial last year and was forced to race for top five on GC, KOM, and stage wins. This year he changed to a team which has been much stronger to keep from losing the five minutes. At the Dauphine, Botero showed strong time trialing speed but did terribly in the mountains raising the question as to whether he will have good climbing form by the Tour. You have to keep an eye the team and rider combination because Botero is strong and determined.

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