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Cadel Evans was upbeat today despite facing one more stage of the Tour de France with his dream of becoming the first Australian to win cycling’s greatest race in tatters.
Evans needed to overhaul a 94-second deficit to leader Carlos Sastre on the penultimate stage, a 53km individual time trial from Cerilly to Saint-Amand-Montrond, but only managed to close the gap to 65 seconds.
“I rode a really good time trial and some other people just had an incredible, incredible time trial … what can I do?” Evans said.
“I went in really well and the team, everyone, was calm and not nervous.
“We came here to do a good race, we did our best and we got beaten.”
Spaniard Sastre, who rides for Team CSC, rode perhaps the best time trial of his career to hold onto the yellow jersey of race leader and likely consign Evans to the runner-up position for the second straight year.
Barring a major mishap, Sastre is expected to hold his place during the 143km final stage, starting in Etampes and finishing with a street circuit taking in the Champs Elysees in Paris early Monday (AEST).
He is set to become Spain’s third successive Tour de France champion after Alberto Contador last year and Oscar Pereiro in 2006.
Evans, who rides for the Belgian Silence-Lotto team, clocked 1 hour 5 minutes 56 seconds for the stage to jump from fourth to second place overall with Sastre timing 1:06:25 to stay 1:05 ahead of the Australian in the standings.
Bernhard Kohl, of the Gerolsteiner team, was in third place.
Germany’s Stefan Schumacher won the stage in 1:03:50.
Evans’ mother, Helen Cocks, landed in Paris at 6.30am local time and then drove for more than four hours to the finish line after making a last-minute decision to fly in from Australia to surprise her son.
Asked what his reaction was when he saw her, she said: “I think he was so exhausted he couldn’t feel anything else.”
“I am so proud of him, he’s wonderful,” Cocks added.
“It would have been good if he could have got the time but he rode a good race so that’s the good thing.”
Evans started the day in fourth place, 10 seconds behind Sastre’s CSC teammate, Frank Schleck of Luxembourg, and one second behind Austrian Kohl.
Schleck slipped to sixth place after today’s stage.
But of the top four, Commonwealth Games time trial champion Evans was widely regarded as the strongest rider in the race against the clock.
Evans first took the yellow jersey on stage 10, a day after a nasty crash left him nursing a sore left shoulder.
He lost the lead to Schleck on stage 15 and Sastre has worn the maillot jaune since winning stage 17.
Evans found himself in a similar situation at last year’s Tour de France, where he needed to make up time on Contador in the final individual time trial.
The Australian narrowly missed his target and was runner-up to Contador in the general classification.
Evans finished eighth on his Tour de France debut in 2005 and was fourth the following year.
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