Crack!
First off, my apologies to Mr. Rasmussen, who I too quickly discounted. Somehow I managed to overlook his performance yesterday in service of his GC man and instead labeled him as having a bad day when it’s obvious it was quite the contrary. That’s what I get for not working harder to get to the TV coverage. He put in a stellar ride today, and I was happy Sastre wasn’t able to catch him in the final kilos after all the work he’d put in. I always feel bad when these big early attacks get swept up at the end.
The big news of course is Landis cracked, and cracked bad. Floyd lost well over 10 minutes today; he’s done. It makes you wonder whether the conservative approach up until now was strategy, or a mask for Landis being weaker than he let on. Tomorrow is another brutal day of climbing and he needs to get quite a bit of time back if he wants to look at even keeping a podium spot. Looks like Floyd’s tour just went belly up.
This leaves Levi the only American still in the top 10 on GC, and he’s just sneaking in under the wire. He was riding well today but wasn’t able to capitalize on the break he got once the leaders started to really attack. This has really turned into a dissapointing year for the Americans, from one that should have been another chance to really shine. Hincapie was patently dissapointing, Leipheimer had that early bad day and has been reluctant to lay himself out it in a big way, Floyd looked good but obviously didn’t have it.
So how does this leave us? Well, it’s a much more open race. Kloden has a slight advantage in the time trial on both Pereiro and Sastre, but not enough to recover the time he’s down now. Sastre sounded like he was going really good today, and tomorrow should be a fun battle to see if he can put Pereiro in trouble. CSC looks to have the stronger team at the moment, depending on how Schleck is going tomorrow, and whether big Jens Voigt is back in play for Sastre may well determine whether they can put enough pressure on Pereiro to get back the time they need. While I’m sad to see Floyd’s hopes go up in smoke it’s certainly turned this into an exciting race.