Course Analysis

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Course Analysis

It is very obvious that the Tour organizers designed this Tour with the hopes of preventing Lance Armstrong from winning his seventh Tour. Ironically, after they released the course description for the 2005 Tour, Lance released the statement that he may not ride the 2005 Tour but might not also means might.

The strategy the Tour organization used to design this years Tour is right out of my ebook. The basic concept is to strip away Lance’s team so the other riders and their teams can go directly after Lance. The method they are using is strategically brilliant. They are trying to force Lance to take the lead earlier so the Discovery Team will have to defend the lead longer causing the team to break, exposing Lance to the attacks of the other teams sooner. L’Blanc made a statement that the sprinters will have to do it differently this year which has me wondering if he has made a significant change to the flatter stages. I will discuss this more later and its implications.

There are ten stages this year which would normally be considered the most significant stages but even some of the flat stages have been made potentially significant by the way they have designed this Tour especially if they designed the last three flat stages the way I think they may have. Unfortunately, they don’t have the profiles for those stages. But even just those ten stages is a huge number of tactically significant stages for GC making up almost half the stages in a Tour that is significantly longer than last year’s Tour at 3,584 kilometers total distance. The seven longest stages are tactically well placed for maximum effect in destroying a team.

For a long time I have known that they could radically alter the strategic character of the Tour by simply making it front-end loaded. To do this, all they would have to do is move the stages which would currently be considered the most significant to the very front of the Tour. I never said anything about this because I didn’t want to put this idea in the organizers heads because it would make the Tour radically less predictable and open it up for at least two to three times more riders who could possibly win the Tour. But since the organizers seem to have at least partly realized this strategy, probably because of my Tour analyses and daily tactical evaluations, you need to understand the principles of this strategy.

If you make the first stage a significant time trial, follow that with the team time trial only two days later, go immediately into five to seven days of mountains, followed a couple of days later with the other flat time trial, and make all the flat stages include at least three cat 3 climbs with an occasional cat 2 climb but no cat 1 or HC climbs, it will force some one like Lance to take the lead with about eight flat stages before the stage into Paris with enough climbing that a break could stay away to the finish in any stage. This would force the race leader’s team to do so much work at the front that no team could survive the effort of defending the race lead that long.

Remember that in flatter stages you can use your entire team for team tactics because riders don’t get shelled out the back as badly by gravity and, if you use a flatter team structure, you can send different GC riders up the road relay attacking the lead team until legs break and then send your best GC rider(s) up the road in a break. If the race leader’s team breaks, such a break could easily gain from three to over five minutes on that leader in just one flat stage.

I hope you have noticed that whenever a flat stage has at least three cat 3 climbs, the peloton drops enough of the top sprinters that there are fewer sprinter teams chasing the break and the breaks tend to stay off. Sprinters like O’Grady, Zabel, and Hushovd know this and tend to ride more for breaks in these stages to win the Points Title and win stages. Therefore, if the flat stages following the mountains have at least three cat 3 climbs and an occasional cat 2 climb each, then the leader’s team can’t depend on the sprinter teams to bring the breaks back in and the leader’s team must ride harder to defend the lead. The other teams using relay attacking with their top GC riders in conjunction with the Points Title sprinters and riders using breaks for a stage win will quickly destroy a team trying to defend the lead for too many stages completely exposing their leader to attacks from other teams.

Also, if you return the Combativity Title to being cumulative, it will encourage even more riders to ride for a break win increasing the chances of the breaks staying off.

By placing most of the flat stages after the most significant stages, the top GC riders wont need to rest as much as possible in the flat stages for the time trials and mountains and can use offensive team tactics and breaks to regain ground that was lost in the mountains and time trials. If a GC rider gets in a break that stays, he can gain from two to five minutes in one stage especially if he is in the break when the leader’s team legs break.

With the normal Tour format, there have been a maximum of about five or six riders who had a serious chance of winning the Tour in any year. If the Tour organizers take the format they are using for the 2005 Tour to the extreme, there could be as many as 10 to 20 riders who could win the Tour by just being in the right break when the race leader’s team breaks. With this race format, the flat stages, team tactics, cumulative Combativity Title, and Points Title become much more significant in determining the GC winner. The Tour becomes strategically much more complex and much less predictable.

The 2005 Tour does this to some extent. It starts with a 19 mile time trial, the team time trial is three days later, the mountains are a long seven stages and three days earlier than last year with the third and second longest stages in the Tour (225 km and 235 km) immediately preceding the mountains, and there are three flat stages following the mountains and before the last time trial making the profile for those last three flat stages very important especially since the first of these three stages is the longest stage in the Tour at 239 km. This format increases the front end loading of the Tour forcing the GC riders to make an effort for the lead beginning with stage one, continue to bid for the lead only three days later, and then makes the GC riders make a full commitment in the mountains three days earlier than before with their team having to defend the lead for at least seven mountain stages plus three flat stages.

Knowing that the USPS team broke or almost broke three times in the last six years and they were at least one of the strongest teams in the world, this new Tour format will definitely break a team’s legs if they try to defend the lead too soon especially if the other teams use the right tactics in the flat stages following the mountains.

The Stages

The most significant stage in the mountains is stage 15 from Lezat sur Leze to Saint lary Soulan. It is the second longest mountain stage at 205 kilometers and will be the day after the longest mountain stage at 220 kilometers. There are six significant climbs with the shallowest being 6.9% in grade and the last five climbs being from 7 to 13 kilometers long. The last climb is a mountain top finish on a 7.6% grade and is 10.7 kilometers long.

The second most significant stage will be stage 14 from Agde to Ax 3 Dmaines. It is the longest mountain stage at 220 kilometers and is only the fourth longest stage in the Tour this year. There are two significant climbs with the first one being on an 8% grade and 15.3 kilometers long and the second one is a mountain top finish on a 7.3% grade and 9.1 kilometers long.

The third most significant stage will be stage 10 from Grenoble to Courchevel. It is the third longest mountain stage at 192 kilometers and is also a mountain top finish. The grades for the two most significant climbs are only 6% and 6.3% but they are long at 20.1 and 21.8 kilometers respectively.

Stage 16 could easily become the fourth most significant stage strategically because of the hard climbing and it is just before the three flat stages (the first flat stage is the longest stage in the Tour) which are just before the last time trial. The peloton could easily break up on this stage presenting tactical opportunities. Watch for it.

The next most significant stage has to be the last time trial with the first time trial being only a little less significant. But it is the big picture for this Tour that presents the real challenge for the teams because the first time trial and the team time trial could easily force some one like Lance to take the lead too soon and their team to do at least some defensive work too early increasing the chances of the team breaking before the end of the race. Therefore, that first time trial could easily turn out to be the most significant stage in the Tour.

On the positive side, the way the event is formatted, it also presents the possibility that, with the right team and tactics, their top GC rider could become the first rider in over half a century to lead the race from start to finish. It would be an extremely sensational feat with today’s teams and tactics. It might also require the other teams to blow a few too many of their tactical opportunities but we have seen that happen more than once. Is it possible that the Tour organizers have thought of this and are using it as bait for a daring rider or some one who may have become over confident? Are they hoping Lance will accept one challenge too many?

Then from the first mountain stage to the second time trial, there are ten stages in which a team could easily be forced to defend the lead. The real potential for catastrophe is from the first rest day until the two most significant stages. They will have three long, hard mountain stages, one flat stage, and no rest day just before those two really long, hard mountain stages. That will be six hard days of racing with four more road stages before the second time trial.

The 2005 Tour is clearly designed to be a team breaker and open up opportunity for more riders to win. With this new format, the profile for all of the flat stages could be significant. Just how flat will they really be? Will they have enough hills in them for breaks to stay off and win the stage making them tactically more significant?

Summary

In conclusion, with the right or wrong team tactics, this race could easily go any number of different directions. I do believe that the Discovery Team won’t survive defending an early lead with their traditional towing tactics. The team will be shattered. With the right profiles for the last three flat stages, it is possible that this Tour could be settled in one of those stages. Strategically, this could easily be the most challenging Tour ever. This Tour can be looked at as an opportunity to prove how good you really are or as a death trap.

The fun of this Tour is for you as spectators to figure out how you would 1) structure your team to win this Tour and 2) how you would set your team strategy. There are so many ways to win and lose this Tour which is why I call its design strategically brilliant. This is promising to be a very fun Tour. With the right team tactics, we could end up with a very radical upset or phenomenal achievement. With the right team tactics, I believe that anyone who can finish in the top five to eight could win this Tour.

See you at the Tour.

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