Excellent, le goût aiment juste le poulet!
Parfait, je voudrais un côté des pommes frites avec la mayo aussi bien.
Roughly translated:
Forgive me sir, how is the Yellow Jersey today?
Excellent, it taste just like chicken!
Perfect, I would like a side of french fries with mayo as well.
Stage 8, with three Cat. 1 climbs and the first up hill finish of this year's Tour, was the perfect lure to goad the Chicken [across] up the road. And it didn't take long for Michael "Chicken" Rasmussen (Rabobank) to spring to it, as he went up the road on the first of the three monstrous Alpine climbs.Not far behind was the side of mayo the Basque country has been waiting to appear since they first saw it was [realistically] on the Tour de France menu back in 2003. It wasn't his greatest effort up an incline, but if you asked Iban Mayo (Saunier Duval-Prodir) about his second place today, I'm sure you'd elicit a smile.
For Mayo, its been a sterling season to date (earlier he won Stage 19 of the Giro d'Italia), and one of great redemption. But even with these recent successes, he remains cautiously optimistic about his chances given his Tour history. From the Saunier Duval website:
"After having been through such a bad patch in the last editions of the Tour, being here, safe and sound, feels like victory to me. My only clear goal is grabbing a stage-win, as I said before I came here. Of course, the GC is tempting; stepping onto the final podium would be very nice. But the Tour is a very difficult race, so we should take it easy, step by step. The important thing is to keep this feeling; the sensations I felt today. And then, if a stage-win or even something bigger comes, we´ll all be very happy.”Rasmussen on the other hand, is as ambitious as he is thin [his fighting height and weight, 5'9" and 130 lbs.]. The Rabobank rider seems to have been given free reign again by management, as he certainly doesn't need any help in the mountains. It'll be interesting to see how Rasumussen's ambitions run up against team leader, Denis Menchov's throughout the remainder of this Tour and beyond.
If Chicken (and no although it may seem reasonable to assume he received his nickname from his slender lower build, he did not) continues his high wire act in the Pyrennes, the only thing stopping him from winning or getting on the podium will be his time trialing skills. Its still quite painful to even think of what transpired during the final time trial in 2005; one which saw Jan Ullrich displace Rasumussen on the final podium, after his horrific day.
Musings:
-- As Phil and Paul kept speculating after the stage today, it would have been interesting to see how far up the classification Alberto Contador (Discovery Channel) would have ridden to if not for his mechanical.
--Favorites not yet ready to fire. I know T-o-03 feels that perhaps a cleaner sport has something to do with the lack of favorites at the forefront. And although I echo his sentiments, I think the lack of favorites firing is more a by-product of having to train cleanly (and therefore race differently).
For a three week Tour, its still a crap shoot as to when a rider's peak form will come around, even for the most seasoned professional. And once that peak appears, it only hangs around for a short time. Last year, Levi Leipheimer (Discovery Channel) was spot on for the Dauphine Libere, but faded in the last week of the Tour. I think all the favorites are following Der Kaiser's [Jan Ullrich] plan of riding into peak form for the final week. None really looked fantastic in any of the pre-Tour build up races, with each showing flashes of brilliance, but not dominance.
There's still a lot of riding to be done, and the steeper Pyrennian climbs, which favor a more explosive climber, will be the true tipping point; that and about 100km in time trialing. They don't call it the "race of truth" for nothing.
MORE:
-- Carmichael Sez (Pezcyclingnews): Patience The Virtue
-- Bonnie DeSimone (ESPN): Discovery's Leipheimer still in the Tour game
Photo: Getty Images
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