I suspect he will be going for 1st next year, if that age bug doesn’t bite him.
LA did well this time and did his team duties. Had Contador not been a team mate then the race may have been closer or different. There were times when he may could have made some time up or pushed the envelope where he remained a team player as he should have. I don’t think he could have won but who knows how it would have turned out. If’as, coulda’s etc don’t change the results though.
I remember in one of his last wins, a rider from Spain (?) went down just in front of him and broke a bone.
To avoid the crash, Lance went off the road and down a steep hill full of dirt and weeds.
You could see in the video that if the crash had happened a few seconds earlier, Lance would have been riding down into a very nasty gulch, and most certainly would have gone over the handlebars into the rocks at 30+ mph....unless he had determined that going over the top of the crash was the better route.
Either way, the result would probably not have been good.