Big stage today! BIG stage!! TdF 2010 Stage 9 graphics and previews are up!
Click the 'To' option to go to the start of the Stage 9 posts.
The Stage starts at 11:35 local time CEST (6 hrs ahead of US EDT).
The first Hors catégorie climb of the 2010 Tour, and it's the tough Col de la Madeleine - 25.5 km climb to 6.2 %, one stretch reaches >11%. Followed by a fiendish descent!
And all this preceded by two Cat 1 hills.
velonews.com - "Covering 204.5km, with two Cat. 1 climbs and one Hors Categorie, it would seem that stage 9 should be the marquee stage of the Alps this year. However, the Cat. 1 Col de la Columbiere and Col des Saises are too far from the finish to be decisive. And the final climb of the day, the Col de la Madeleine (25.5km at 6.2 percent), tops out with more than 30km to go and does not suit the explosive climbing styles of Contador or the Schlecks.
A similar stage in 2005 — over the Madeleine and Galibier climbs before finishing in the valley at Briançon — was won by Vinokourov out of a long breakaway with Santiago Botero."
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A Legendary Collapse
DAILY LANCE: Armstrong says, "This Tour is finished for me." By Bill Strickland, Bicycling Magazine
July 12, 2010:
After getting caught up in crashes three times on Stage 8, the Tour de France's first major climbing day, the race's record-holding seven-time champion Lance Armstrong lost more than 11 minutes to the top contenders. He slipped to 39th place in the General Classification (overall standings). As he past the finish line atop the mountain of Morzine, he stopped and told reporters, "This Tour is finished for me. But I'm going to hang in there and enjoy my last Tour de France."
Armstrong-who with some humor called the stage, "A really bad day," and later posted on his Twitter feed that, "When it rains it pours I guess"—was forced to ride into the grass beside the road to avoid going down in a crash just a few kilometers into the stage. His teammates massed around him to bring him back to the pack. With a little more than 50 kilometers left in the 189 km stage, he clipped a pedal in a roundabout just as the leaders were beginning to ramp up the speed for an assault on the Category 1 climb up the Col de la Ramaz. "I was rolling on the ground at 65 kilometers an hour," Armstrong said. His teammates again dropped back to help him return to the pack. But with the speed of the peloton so high, "it's hard to come back," Armstrong said, "hard on the body. We didn't make it back until the start of Ramaz, and I was pegged."
On Ramaz, Team Sky (riding for Bradley Wiggins) and Team Saxo Bank (riding for eventual stage winner Andy Schleck) set a withering pace and Armstrong fell off the back. RadioShack kept Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden in the lead group; Chris Horner and Janez Brajkovic were assigned to stay with Armstrong on Ramaz and the descent. The trio were maintaining a gap of about a minute to the contenders when, near the summit of a small climb before the final Category 1 ascent of Morzine-Avoriaz, a Euskatel and a Saxo Bank rider fell in front of Armstrong, nearly bringing him down again.
In 2003, on his way to his fifth consecutive Tour de France victory, Armstrong had come under attack and was looking vulnerable. For the first time, rivals were attacking him over and over in the mountains, and most experts thought one of the relentless counterpunches would eventually crack Armstrong. During one attack on the climb of Luz Ardiden, Armstrong was chasing when his handlebar snagged a spectator's bag. Armstrong was thrown to the ground. He immediately popped to his feet, grabbed his bike, threw a leg over it and began pumping the pedals. The bike, it would later be discovered, had a partially broken frame. But Armstrong didn't care. He sprinted through his rivals and won the stage by 40 seconds.
In Tour de Lance, my chronicle of Armstrong's return to the sport last year, I wrote about witnessing the unfamiliar sight of him being unable to conquer the race: "The jersey, like all hallowed sporting grails, has its lore. One of the tenets is that its wearer rides with the strength of two men. Armstrong himself, however, is a sort of sporting grail all his own. Like the yellow jersey, he sometimes seems capable of bending the race to his will. In the Tour's 2005 team time trial, his Discovery team was behind the pace of CSC (the predecessor of Saxo Bank) and its yellow-jersey-wearing Dave Zabriskie. In the last two kilometers, Zabriskie clipped a teammate's wheel and crashed into the metal barrier lining the course. He finished 1:26 behind his team, which lost to Discovery by two seconds. Armstrong had won the stage and the jersey. Zabriskie will still barely talk about the incident to this day. With more resignation than rage, at the line that day Bjarne Riis, CSC's director, called Armstrong, 'the lucky golden guy.' So many times over so many years I had witnessed Armstrong bend the Tour de France to his will. Now for the first time I wondered if the race was, as it did with everyone else, bending him. The Tour de France ennobles men, turns them into heroes. Then eventually it turns its heroes into men, by humbling them."
After the third, silly crash in the feed zone this year, Armstrong unclipped from his pedal, untangled himself from the frame, put his hands on his hips and looked down at his bike, pausing for a second. Two seconds. "He's done." I said. "He just gave up on the Tour. Right now." And he had.
Brajkovic continued on with Armstrong, for the most part looking straight ahead and with an odd, deferential and respectful incline to his head. Other riders who passed Armstrong appeared unwilling to look directly at him, perhaps out of respect, perhaps out of sadness, perhaps out of a kind of almost fear.
The Tour hadn't destroyed a champion like this since 1996. Back then, Miguel Indurain had won five Tours in a row (the first to ever achieve that many consecutively). The six-foot-two Spaniard rode with a ruthless but stoic, almost-gentle riding style. Pedaling an enormous gear with a slow cadence, Indurain created unrecoverable gaps in the time trails-he won a 65-kilometer TT in 1992 by 3 minutes. Then in the mountains he sat among the leaders like an imperturbable giant who neither needed nor could be bothered to win those stages. (In fact, over those five years he won only two stages that weren't time trials.) But in '96, under intense pressure from younger rivals, he cracked wide apart on a climb, suddenly pedaling as if trying to yank his legs out of waist-deep, hardening concrete. He went on to finish 14 minutes off the podium and never again contend for a Tour.
As Cadel Evans moved into the yellow jersey, as Andy Schleck took the stage win but, more importantly, launched an attack near the top that defending champion Alberto Contador could not match, as Leipheimer became RadioShack's top rider, Armstrong stood after the finish with elbows and knees bloody and seemed to accept his fate: "I had a bad day. I've had a lot of good days at the Tour. I am staying in the race. I will work for my team now."