Tour de France Stage 17: Sastre Brilliant, But Was It Enough?

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Carlos Sastre repaid all the efforts of his teammates
by winning Stage 17 and taking the yellow jersey.
Photo: Graham Watson

L’Alpe d’Huez is a special place. This is the grandstand of the sport, like walking on the 18^th green at Augusta or center court at Wimbeldon. It’s not that the gradient or the length is all that different from other climbs. In fact, there are harder ascents in the Tour de France, but none which are ridden with the intensity of the Alpe. This is the crucible, the place where the pressure is highest and the prestige is greatest for the winner. Today, Carlos Sastre added his name to the list of champions to win atop l’Alpe d’Huez, and he achieved his greater goal of taking the race leader’s yellow jersey. The question now is whether he can keep it all the way to Paris.

 

Carlos Sastre has been waiting for Stage 17 ever since the Tour de France route was announced last fall. As a slightly-built climbing specialist who excels in three-week Grand Tours, incredibly difficult mountain stages like today’s are perfectly suited to his talents. His CSC-Saxo Bank team was completely built to support his bid to win the 2008 Tour de France, and the team’s tactics throughout the past two and half weeks of racing were designed to wear down Sastre’s main rivals so he could launch one devastating assault on today’s final climb, leave the competition behind, and gain enough time to not only take the yellow jersey but build a time buffer large enough to insulate his lead through Saturday’s 53-kilometer individual time trial.

 

The CSC-Saxo Bank plan worked pretty much to perfection, not just today but thus far in the Tour de France as a whole. Up until today, their relentless pace-making at the front of the pack on every major climb hadn’t created a significant time gap to the most dangerous rival in the race, Australian Cadel Evans. But all that changed today on l’Alpe d’Huez.

 

Evans is a strong and consistent rider who is very difficult to drop in the mountains, but if there was a day he would struggle it was going to be today. On paper Stage 17 was the hardest stage of the entire 2008 Tour de France. All of the significant climbs in the Tour de France are given a 1-4 ranking according to difficulty, with 4 being the easiest and 1 being the hardest. But for the incredibly arduous ascents the Tour reserves the ranking “beyond category”, and Stage 17 climbed three beyond-category mountains. Add to that the fatigue from two and half weeks of racing, having ridden over two beyond-category climbs yesterday, and the fact the riders would be in the saddle for more than six hours before reaching the final ascent to the finish today, and you can begin to understand how tortuous Stage 17 was.

 

And so Carlos Sastre waited patiently for the mountains to take their toll on his rivals and hoped his talent for climbing, his months of preparation, and the hard work of his teammates would all come together and give him the advantage he needed to accelerate away from Cadel Evans, Denis Menchov, Christian Vande Velde, Bernhard Kohl, and even his teammates Frank and Andy Schleck on l’Alpe d’Huez. As a climbing specialist he had one hand to play and it needed to come up aces.

 

It did, but as Sastre was quick to point out after the finish, winning the stage and taking the yellow jersey with a 1:34 lead over Evans wouldn’t have been possible without his teammates. As Sastre sped away from the contenders’ group on the lower slopes of the final climb, his teammates Frank and Andy Schleck went to work to thwart anyone’s efforts to chase down their team leader. Whenever anyone accelerated there was a Schleck brother on their back wheel or bringing the rest of the group back to them. And since Frank Schleck was wearing the yellow jersey, riders were forced to respond immediately to any accelerations he made himself, and that disrupts the rhythm and organization of a chase on a big mountain pass. Particularly important in this was the fact that Frank Schleck knew full well that by thwarting the chase he was sacrificing the very yellow jersey he was wearing.

 

The CSC-Saxo Bank team came to the Tour de France to deliver Sastre to Paris in yellow, and even though Frank Schleck was the current leader of the race, it was his job to support Sastre and sacrifice his chances of winning the Tour de France. Of course, he’s still in second place overall even after today’s stage, and while he’ll likely finish further down on the leaderboard in Paris due to his weakness in the time trial, he’s young and he’ll come back to the Tour de France as an undisputed team leader in the years to come.

 

It was a perfect day for CSC-Saxo Bank, one of several perfect tactical days they’ve had thus far in the 2008 Tour de France. But it’s still unclear if the time gains made today by Carlos Sastre will be enough. Saturday, the day before the race arrives in Paris, there’s a 53-kilometer individual time trial. It’s the discipline that represents Sastre’s greatest weakness and Evans’ greatest strength. The time gap between the two of them is 94 seconds, meaning Evans has to go 1.8 seconds faster, per kilometer, on Saturday to take the yellow jersey off Sastre’s back. It won’t be an easy feat to achieve, but on a good day it is within Evans’ capabilities. Last year Alberto Contador won the 2007 Tour de France by 21 seconds. In 1989 Greg Lemond won it by just eight. It’s entirely possible that this year’s winner could be decided by even fewer than that.

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