Post Tour Analysis

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Post Tour Analysis

First, everyone thought busting the dopers and throwing them out of the Tour would make for a weak and boring Tour. It was anything but that. If anything, it made the Tour much more exciting and unpredictable. I posted once before that we should just bust out the rest of the dopers and make cycling even more fun and one of my readers commented that some of the dopers have stated that 95% of the pro riders are dopers and wondered if that would gut pro racing.

There are two comments to that. First, we have learned over the last 50+ years that criminals tend to say that "everyone else" is doing it to make the criminals feel better about their criminal activity and to make others think the criminals are not all that bad because "everyone else is doing it." We have always found their claims to be exaggerated, often grossly.

Second, Let's say the dopers are right that 95% of the pro's do dope. OK, that will just open up a lot of jobs for amateurs who don't dope and make the bike racing even more unpredictable and fun. Let's get it done and have more great cycling fun. We have just learned that we don't need the cheaters for bike racing to be fun and exciting.

The Tour started off by the sprinter teams controlling the stages by bringing back the breaks and setting up for sprints because the Tour organization won't go back to the old format for the Combativity Title. Even with this, there were some stages in which the racing was unusually hard and fast because teams couldn't decide to let breaks go since no break pleased everyone. By the time the peloton got to the mountains, their legs were unusually tired.

The Landis Phenomenon

Then there is what I am calling the Landis Phenomenon which is Landis' incredible come back. This is the first time in the modern history of the Tour that I have seen anyone successfully stage a come back from more than 3 or 4 minutes down and win the Tour. As a matter of fact, just being 2 minutes down has been too much for most top GC riders to over come. I decided to do an analysis to see what caused this to be possible because all of the riders seemed too close together in performance for this to happen before Stage 17. It turns out that it was a combination of a number of things including course format, sports psychology, and physiology.

Course Format

I warned you in my course analysis that Stage 17 was a strange stage that could provide surprises and it did. You had a really long and hard mountain stage following two really hard mountain stages and it finished with a near mountain top finish following an HC category climb. This plus tired legs, a bad assumption by the coaches, miss calculations, and the top GC riders being new causing the coaches to have to guess at team strategies set up the Landis Phenomenon.

Bad Assumption

The coaches for the opposing teams made the bad assumption that because Landis had broken the day before and was over 8 minutes down that he was not a threat and fell asleep. This blurred their judgments and timing. It caused them to permit Landis to gain too much time too late in the stage thinking they would bring it all back in with their teams and they failed to start the chase after Landis soon enough.

They let Landis achieve a gain of 9 minutes before they began to chase and the teams were only able to bring back 2'20" of it by the bottom of the last climb so that the team leaders had to bring back 6'40" on their own. Sastre brought back another 1'35" by the top of the climb but lost another 40" on the short descent.

They should have remembered Tyler Hamilton's flyer on a similar course where he regained a huge amount of time with such a solo because the peloton chased too late and that Landis was still a top GC rider. Big mistake that cost them the race.

Great Strategy

Plus you have to give credit to whomever set up the attack strategy for Landis because it was a really great strategy that gave Landis a lot of time to open ground. What they did was to have their domestiques set a pace early enough in the race that no one wanted to try to maintain it for the entire stage. This shattered the peloton and broke up the teams turning it, temporarily, into an individual event. When Landis was up the road with only the team leaders and their teams shattered behind them, he attacked dropping the leaders. This put the other team leaders in the position of chasing Landis as a small pack or giving Landis time by falling back and regrouping their teams. They chose the latter and it took some time for the teams to rebuild and set to work. Plus, even after they got their teams back together, they failed to work immediately to bring Landis back in.

Mean while, Landis charged up the road to bridge to the break. After He caught the break, he worked with them using them as his team for a large portion of the stage instead of riding the entire stage solo like the regular media are making it look like Landis did. He managed to use the remnant of the break to conserve enough energy to help him hold off the charging, how be it late, peloton. Add to this that Landis kept Sinkewitz with him until the bottom of the last climb though the TMO rider didn't do any work towing Landis, him riding on Landis' wheel helped Landis ride at least two to three miles per hour faster than if Landis had been riding a true solo. In my e-book, "A Better Way To Train", I teach how and why this works which should show you that Sinkewitz should have dropped back to help tow Kloden instead of riding Landis' wheel. Landis rode smart, like I teach, and it worked. He properly managed his energy reserves and won the stage, got back into the fight for GC, and won the Tour.

I call this bike chess and it really helps you get more out of your legs if you use your head even just a little. This is not a sport for stupid people.

The TT results

Why did the time trial results come out so differently from the first time trial? I got very close, closer than most, to figuring out the final time trial results but wanted to see where the differences came from so I did an energy consumption analysis for the three hardest stages prior to the last time trial.

First, everyone of the top six on GC took it easy the last day before the time trial so what I was looking for was differences in riding for the three days prior to that last day or stages 15 through 17.

What you have to understand is that you have to consider relative performances because we are looking at their performances in relation to each other. If we have two riders, rider A and rider B, who are even on performance and rider A rides harder than rider B on one day, the next day rider B will be less tired and appear to be strong than rider A on the second day. This is the fundament for energy conservation required for stage racing. When, where, and how do you expend your energy in relation to the energy expenditure of your competition is what determines who wins most stage races.

In all the stages, all the top GC riders rested on their teams' wheels until the last climb except for Landis' "solo" break in stage 17 but, even there, Landis was smart enough to use wheels when he could. His basic strategy was to break from one group and leap frog to the next rider or group using them to rest until he was ready to leap frog again. It is an old but, obviously, still effective strategy used by solo experts in road racing.

What I found is that the reason Landis was able to ride so well in the time trial was because he rode stage 15 really hard, rest stage 16 because he was dropped and forced to spin to the top of the last climb in a low gear and taking it 10 minutes slower than the others, and rode most of stage 17 hard. This meant that, in exercise physiology terms, he didn't ride hard two days in a row which is the worst thing you can do for recovery. Basically, he rode hard, rested, rode hard, rested, and did a great time trial.

Pereiro was able to ride the last time trial much better in relation to Landis and the others than in Stage 11 because he was paced on his team's wheels as they towed him up most of those climbs with only one pretty hard effort on which he still spent most of the climb sitting on the wheels of the other GC riders he was with. He was probably doing from 10% to as much as 20% less work than the other riders during those days saving energy with smart racing like I teach in my Professional Riding section of my e-book.

Sastre did worse than the other top six GC riders in the time trial because he rode harder on all three stages than anyone else including Landis. He attacked and bridged to Landis and Kloden on Stage 15, attacked and did a really hard solo to gain ground when Landis broke in Stage 16, and did a really long, hard solo chase against Landis out climbing him on the last HC climb by 1'35" on Stage 17, and was so tired for the time trial he lost ground big time dropping from, what should have been, second place to fourth place on GC.

Kloden sat wheel in most of all three stages saving at least 10% to 20% over the other riders like Sastre, Evans, and Menchov and gave ground on Stage 17 meaning he didn't ride it as hard and saved energy. Therefore, he was able to ride the time trial better in relation to the other top GC riders than he had when they were all fresher in stage 11.

Evans attacked all three days and got his butt dropped in two of the stages. He worked hard in all three stages but not as hard as Sastre and therefore, was down in performance in relation to Landis, Pereiro, and Kloden.

Menchov rode just about the same as Evans and had the same time trial results.

It still comes down to energy conservation and management to win bike races.

Now about tomorrow; what, they haven't got next year's Tour course posted yet? :-)

So, you should do a performance analysis like this and use what I teach in my e-book to help you custom design your training program and fine tune it after every event your ride whether competitive or recreational. Always look to eliminate your weaknesses and build on your strengths.

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