And so to wrap up my 2009 Tour de France coverage …
There was a lot of guys you were told to watch for before this race started, some featured highly while some disapointed. There were individual stage winners who for a 24-hour period were the focus of the media and there were men who managed to carry the Yellow Jersey for a while before the big time favorites took over. Bringing to an end my in depth coverage of the 2009 Tour de France, here is a look at a selection of big names, including stage winners, yellow jersey holders and British, Canadian and Irish riders and how they finished the tour overall …
It has been making all the post-tour talk this week which I suppose makes a pleasant change from some post-tour drug scandal, and one that has kept cycling in the mainstream media for a few days longer than it normally does. A good rivalry is never a bad thing in professional sports at any level and the press normally jump all over it, hell this one has already got people talking about what could be at Le Tour 2010, but I, for various circumstances, am the last pro-cycling fan/blogger left to put an opinion forward on it (if you don’t count what I have wrote on Twitter). Read More»
A video I watched this evening in tribute to the return to F1 by Michael Schumacher.
Watch Schumacher dominate the opening laps of the ‘97 Belgian Grand Prix. Starting third he takes a lap to dispose of Alesi before easily catching and, with some fine praise from Murray Walker, passing Jacques Villeneve. Within a handful of laps he is easily 16 seconds clear. Brilliant wet weather driving.
I often wonder what headline will be my sports story of the year, what incident, what event? Today without a doubt I got the headline, the event and the incident … the return of the great Michael Schumacher to Formula One. Schumacher is statistically the greatest driver in the history of the sport and, maybe along with Senna, my favorite driver of all time. I grew up watching Schumacher, I had his hat, Ferrari t-shirts, his sunglasses and a huge Ferrari flag growing up and in August 2000 I lived my dream of getting to see an F1 race in person and most importantly, Schumacher. I truly believed that if you hadn’t seen Schumacher in person before now then your chance had gone, until today.
Massa is going to take time to recover that much is certain and he is likely to miss a number of races so the big question doing the rounds is who will replace him. The likely choice is one of the two Ferrari test drivers Luca Badoer or Mark Gene but the heart-felt dream of many F1 fans is that Michael Schumacher will get behind the wheel again. Read More»
In the midst of all my Tour de France watching this weekend I also managed to spare a thought for the Formula One that was taking place in Hungary. I tuned in for a little bit of the qualifying and the majority of the race but what Lewis Hamilton’s sudden rise back to the top of the podidum out of nowhere was not the talking point of the weekend like it should have been … no Felippe Massa’s ill health following a terrible crash in Saturday qualifying has grabbed the attention.
The final stage in the Tour de France is never one to write home about except for the last few laps up and down the Champs-Élysées. Bets were off on who was going to win, everyone knew it, it was jut about executing it and when he did pull the trigger, Mark Cavendish put in one of the great sprint finishes of his career. To nearly every other rider in the pack who isn’t a sprinter the stage is a procession into Paris to celebrate the achievement of finishing the Tour de France; whether you be Contador celebrating the victory of the Tour or the Lantern Rouge rider coming in last overall just happy to have gotten around the course, this race is all about relaxing, enjoying and chatting to your fellow riders. Even the Astana team passed round a few glasses of champagne while riding into Paris. But indeed for the sprinters it is still serious business and when the race hits the cobbled stones of Champs-Élysées the racing starts for the final 30 or so miles. It was then that the attacks came in as some riders tried to spoil the day for the sprinters but this kind of thing happens every single year and like every year before it the break was pulled back on the final lap setting up a big sprint.
