le Tour de France, 2012

london olympics: cav says, “i’m nervous”

Just a week after a successful TDF for British riders, the Olympic cycling road race is taking place from central London to Surrey and back.

This is a 250 kms race, with Cavendish hoping for a road race win.

That looks like a hell of a reach to me, after three weeks of the Tour de France.

153 cyclists out of 198 finished the Tour. Mark Cavendish came in 142nd, at nearly three and a half hours after Bradley Wiggins!

Today’s race goes nine times up the pimple at Box Hill, a road I’ve ridden many times.This is not going to be easy after the extraordinary stress of the Tour.

At least the ‘sponsors’ cannot charge people for watching from the roadside.

[Now watchable on Eurosport.]

Update: First Froome, then Wiggins faded away. A 50-second breakaway by Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan [gold medal] and Rigoberto Uran of Colombia [silver medal] was insurmountable.

the finish - cav wins again with a wiggins lead out!

The final stage of the 2012 Tour de France has been won by Mark Cavendish for the fourth time running, led out by the Yellow Jersey holder, Bradley Wiggins.
Bradley Wiggins is the first Briton (Englishman) to win the most prestigious endurance race in the world.

This is the best thing to happen to UK cycling since Reg Harris won the world sprint championship three or four times.

I’m glad to see the pressure to revive Herne Hill is also being renewed.

The The Herne Hill Velodrome is the last remains of the last time the UK held the Olympics, when Reg came second!

cav’s priority - the olympics, not the green jersey

Mark Cavendish, the Manx Missile, won the green points jersey in last year’s Tour de France. To this Cav added the road world championship jersey last September. But this year, a week after the end of the TDF, the London Olympics start, and Mark Cavendish has his eyes on the 250-kilometre road race. His plan is to use the Tour as conditioning prior to the Olympics, opening on 28th July.

Cav will be helping his team, Sky, to put team mate Bradley Wiggins in the yellow jersey, to make Bradley the first British winner of the TDF. While Cav wants to win some stages, he is likely to be seen being a domestique for the team, bringing water bottles forward, and helping to protect Bradley Wiggins in the final week.

2012 tour de france route

From Saturday 30 June to Sunday 22th July, 2012, the 99th Tour de France will be competed during 21 stages, well actually a prologue and 20 stages, over a distance of 3,479 kilometres.

There will be:

• Nine flat stages
• Six high mountain stages with 3 summit finishes
• Four hilly stages that finish with a climb
• Two individual time trials (against the clock stage)
• A prologue around Liege in Belgium
• Two rest days.

The special features of the race are

• 25 cols gone over and summit finishes that are ranked 2nd, 1st or hors catégorie (HC)

  1 in Les Vosges, with a summit finish at 1,035 m (La Planche des Belles Filles)
  3 in le Jura
  4 in Swiss Jura
  6 in the Alps, with a summit finish at 1,705 m (La Toussuire-Les Sybelles)
  11 in the Pyrénées, with a summit finish at approx. 1,600 m (Peyragudes)

   

• 9 towns not previously visited: Abbeville, Annonay Davézieux, Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, La Planche des Belles Filles, Peyragudes, Porrentruy, Samatan, Tomblaine, Visé.

The 2012 Tour de France starts by spending three days in Belgium from the Grand Départ in the Province of Liège. The first day will be the short prologue (mini-time trial) at Liège, and next day the first stage from Liège to Seraing. The second stage from Visé to Tournai is also in Belgium.

There is also going to be a detour into Switzerland and back to Porrentruy in Jura for the finish of the eighth stage.

No bonus
For the 2012 edition, no bonuses will be awarded for intermediate sprints and stage finishes.

One intermediate sprint
As in 2011, the points awarded for the green jersey classification will be for a single intermediate sprint and for the stage finish. [Commentary from 2011.]

Mountain points scheme
For this 2012 edition, points will be awarded to the first ten going over col summits classified as hors categorie.
Points will be doubled for summit finishes.

Nearly 100 kilometres against the clock
A prologue (6.1 km) and two individual against-the-clock stages: 38 km from Arc-et-Senans to Besançon, and 52 km between Bonneval and Chartres the day before the final arrival on the Champs-Elysees. (Note that a prologue is a short time-trial used to determine who will wear the yellow jersey on the first long day of racing.)

Prize funding
In total about there is about 2 million euros prize money for teams and riders, with 450, 000 euros to the winner of the individual general classification - the yellow jersey.

the summer of steep slopes

In 1987, the year when Stephen Roche won the Triple Crown - the Tour d’Italie [the Giro], the Tour de France and the world championship, a fairly romantic film appeared called L’été en pente douce - The summer of gentle slopes. If a film should be made of this year’s Tour, its title would be L’été en pente raide - The summer of steep slopes.

This year’s Tour is slotted between several centenaries celebrated since 2003 - the Tour itself, the Ballon d’Alsace, Tourmalet, Galibier - and the 100th edition of the Tour de France in 2013. Instead of focussing on height or distance, the TDF have decided to make this year’s difficulties on the route a celebration of steepness.

• Stage 7 (7 July), La Planche des Belles Filles
  According to local legend, in 1635 a group of young girls chose to climb this mountain and drown themselves in the black waters of a lake to escape the abuses of cruel Swedish mercenaries, stationned at the village of Plancher-les-Mines in the bottom of the valley.
  
  The TDF has not been here before. The prolonged and irregular ascent of 5.9 km starts with a slope of 13%, with an untarmacked section of 300 metres of average 14% slope and a bit at 20%, arriving at 1,035 metres height.
  
  
• Stage 8 (8 July), Le col de la Croix
  Again the first visit for the TDF, this slope is short, only 4 km and arriving at 789 metres height, but it has an average gradient of 9.2% with a maximim slope of 17%. This corresponds to the difficulty of the Wall of Huy in the Flèche Wallonne [the Wallonne Arrow].
  
  
• Stage 10 (11 July), Le col du Grand Colombier
  Over 17.4 km with an average of 7.1% gradient, this slope ends at 1,501 m. However, the elevation developed is more than 1,245 m from Culoz (just after the Sprint). This is more than the 1,127 m height difference from Bourg d’Oisans and Alpe-d’Huez (often part of the TDF as in stage 19 of the 2011 TDF, and a popular cyclist’s climb | Google translation).
  
  
• Stage 14 (15 July), Le mur de Péguère
  On paper, the Peguère Wall is 9.4 km at an average 7.9% gradient. Not much you might think, until you look more closely and see that the last 3.6 km are at an average of 12% - a good 15 minutes uphill slog.

the stages for 2012

There will be a short prologue stage around Liege and then a further 20 stages. These include 6 high mountain stages [Alps 2, Pyrenees 4], 4 medium mountain/hilly stages, and two individual against-the-clock [contre-le-montre] time trials. There are 2 rest days. All other days are ‘on the plain’ - relatively flat days, almost touring through France. The total distance ridden will be about 3,479 kilometres, or roughly 2,162 miles. Switzerland will be visited on the 8th stage.

this year’s t-shirt

“100% cotton, 20€”

the teams for 2012

team colours/strips

this year’s top ten seeded riders

watch tdf broadcasts

In 2011, many web sites offered live streaming from their sites. We are leaving that information here until we can obtain the information for 2012. This will probably appear only on the first day of the 2012 TDF.

Some web sites want you to pre-register, and even pay. Here are a few of the more reputable sites that were available for the 2011 TDF. They may well be broadcasting again in 2012. Of course, until the TDF is actually running, we cannot verify any links provided.

last year (2011): the first ten riders

the mountain stages

Tour de France 2012 will include 25 peaks ranked as second, first or hors catégorie:

• 1 in the Vosges (stage 7)
• 4 in the Swiss Jura (stage 8)
• 3 in the Jura (stage10)
• 6 in the Alps (stages 11, 12)
• 11 in the Pyrenees (stages 14, 16, 17)

During the last five Tours de France, the total of mountain stages were:

• 22 in 2007
• 17 in 2008
• 21 in 2009
• 25 in 2010
• 23 in 2011.

Vosges and Jura

the Alps and Pyrenees

Some reference keywords/tags:

Le Tour de France,cycle race,colors,Mark Cavendish,Lance Armstrong,Bradley Wiggins,Andy Schleck,Contador,contre-le-montre,par equipe,watching the Tour de France,record,le Tour de France 2012,cycling,exclusive photo,photograph,picture,étape,

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