My favourite rider Estabon Chavis (a Columbian) trails in second place at 3 min down. He had a poor day yesterday losing some time in the mountains, which are normally his strong point. With three hard climbing days to come I am hoping he can close the gap and head home with the pink jersey, but that is a lot of time to make up in this class of racing.
Here we are a week later and Kruijwijk has crashed out on the penultimate day, leaving Chavis in pink. But lousy team management robs him of victory, allowing a break to go up the road with none of his teammates in it. This forces Chavis's team to work on the front of the bunch chasing the break and by the time the riding gets really hard, they are burnt out. Further most importantly, unlike his major competitor Nibali, he does not have a team mate up the road to help pace him as Nibali rides away to win the event.
Since my days in the saddle there have been huge changes take place with such things as equipment, aero dynamics, diet, and most importantly mental training. We used to race with the mindset that when you where tailed off by another rider or group of riders you where beaten. This mind set is still common in World class running on the track. When do you see a runner fight back and make contact again. But in cycling, riders frequently claw their way back and often attack after making contact. This is all down to mental training.
Another factor that has made watching this stage race so enjoyable is the excellent commentary. Most cycle racing in recent years has been covered by Carlton Kirby a veritable drama queen. His measure of success is how many people he can get to tweet him. With little knowledge of the sport he has to resort to reading tweets such as "what did you commentators have to eat for dinner last night" or "what is your favourite jellybean flavour." Of the thousands of viewers watching how many will be waiting in awe for the answers to these questions. Fortunately he is not covering this event so one can watch in its entirety instead of tuning in odd times to get an update and watching the finish.
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