As befits a man who regularly reminds his Twitter followers that “querer es poder” – a Spanish take on “If you dream it, you can achieve it” – and who declared the Giro-Tour double to be “only impossible until someone makes it possible,” Alberto Contador is hardly averse to battling the odds.
At this Tour de France, however, there is a growing sense that taking on the startling collective might of Chris Froome’s Team Sky cohort is tantamount to tilting at windmills. Even for a rider of Contador’s imagination, conjuring up victory here already seems a grand gesture too far.
Already 4:04 down on Froome after wilting – like so many others – under the weight of Sky’s forcing on the first mountaintop finish to La Pierre-Saint-Martin two days ago, Contador was decidedly on the back foot entering the Tour’s final stage in the Pyrenees to Plateau de Beille.
ADVERTISEMENT
His response was a typically defiant one. After setting his teammates Roman Kreuzger and Rafal Majka to work on the lower slopes of the final climb, Contador unleashed an attack of his own a little over eight kilometres from the summit, as a heavy rainstorm washed over the Ariège.
The sparkle of his accelerations at the Giro d’Italia was lacking, however. With the same laboured style he showed in the 2013 Tour, Contador gained only 50 metres or so, and was quickly reeled back in by the pace-making efforts of Sky’s Richie Porte and Geraint Thomas.
“It wasn’t an attack on Froome, it was an attack the see how all of the riders were,” Contador said afterwards. “Maybe I could have waited longer, for the last three or four kilometres. There was wind on the climb and it wasn’t easy to attack.”
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest News http://ift.tt/1gEHo5d
No comments:
Post a Comment