Is it just circumstance or is Marcel Kittel just so much better than any other sprinter in the Tour de France?
Kittel won for the third time in four stages today, turning the Lille finale into a procession as he again easily held off his rivals for a second consecutive day.
You can’t help but admire the German efficiency that goes into the winning like this. It’s a flawlessly executed race plan, and for a team it doesn’t get any better than that.
But in a sense, while there is a lot of sausage in winning so efficiently, there isn’t maybe so much sizzle.
And so as each sprint comes and goes, Kittel increases his hold over the fast men and turns what was so keenly anticipated just four days ago into a relative snore fest.
Peter Sagan looks like he’s the only one that can challenge Kittel for stage wins and Kittel looks like the only rider that can give Sagan a run for his money for the Green jersey.
Oh what we would give for a fit Mark Cavendish?
With Cav injured and a compromised Andre Greipel, the sprints have really fizzled out.
For Greipel, Greg Henderson’s crash and subsequent abandonment was one blow, but that fall also brought down Lotto Belisol teammates Lars Bak and Bart De Clerq.
In the finale, you could see Greipel trying but he just didn’t have the power, presumably from having to do more work. That said, what was his excuse for finishing 23rd on Tuesday?
Has Greipel passed his peak at this level of racing? He turns 32 in eight days’ time, so that shouldn’t be the case.
Sagan could’ve challenged but surrendered valuable energy after chasing back from a crash inside the final 20 kilometres.
Mark Renshaw was given the best lead-out by the Omega Pharma Quickstep train but couldn’t go on with it. Of course, he has massive shoes to fill but that was a lot of energy expended to only finish seventh.
It was good to see those feisty Frenchmen Arnaud Demare and Bryan Coquard sandwich the fourth-placed Sagan, but like everyone else this week Kittel is like a six-speed car to their five-speed version.
Lampre’s fast boy, Elia Viviani improved 100 places from Stage 3, but still couldn’t crack the top 15.
C’mon guys, surely someone can mount a challenge other than Sagan.
So thank goodness we’ll have something else to focus on tomorrow. Pave. How can one word generate so much anticipation?
Easy. It rained in Lille today and reports are the pave is wet too. Very wet. We haven’t even had rain at Paris Roubaix for a few years so this should be make things more than interesting.
I’m actually scared for the GC contenders, especially Chris Froome.
The clash of riders that brought him down today with 159 kilometres to race, not only banged up Froome’s hip but also hurt his left wrist. The defending champion finished the race wearing a splint. Any lingering pain from that will be brutally exposed on the pave.
The official medical report describes the injury as a contusion, but you can bet that Team Sky have organised some x-rays to be certain there is nothing more damaging lurking under his skin.
Tomorrow will be as much about luck as it will be about courage, and the old Tour cliché, “no one can win the Tour tomorrow, but you can easily lose it” will never be more apt.
The debate about whether we should even have pave or not is sure to resume in about 24 hours.
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