Originally Posted by
MinnMan
OK, the other thing I don't understand is that Sky actually had a guy in the breakaway. Well, it's true that he eventually won the race (good consolation for Sky, given that Froome folded), but early on his contribution to keeping the breakaway going was helping Talansky and hurting Froome, wasn't it? Why contribute to a breakaway that's hurting your GC contender?
I think the plan was to hedge their bets.... if Froome had the legs to get back into the GC race near the end, they would have abandoned the stage win and brought Nieve back to help Froome. When it became clear that this wasn't going to happen, they had a shot at the stage win and it paid off. Hard to fault this strategy in retrospect. If Nieve helped at all, he certainly didn't help enough to make any significant difference in the 4-min interval between Talansky and Froome. They might have helped Talansky enough to withstand Contador's late push and if so, that was also a good thing - if Sky was going to lose the GC, then sure as heck would rather lose it to Talansky than Contador.
In truth, I can't remember a race like this - the final stage of a race where a top-3 GC contender just 30-40 seconds down is allowed to get himself into a big breakaway early on. I would have thought that the other GC contending teams would immediately move to the front of the peloton and chase down the breakaway. They were so sure that they would chase him down later?
That part of the race wasn't televised, but I'd surmise that Froome simply didn't have the legs to chase. Sky has had pretty good luck with letting the breaks go, but it backfired this time. The surprising thing to me was how long Contador waited until he launched. He did it right at the point where it was almost an impossible task. This may simply have been not wanting to turn him inside-out anymore than they already had and feeling that beating Froome/Sky was more important the losing to Talansky/Garmin.
Personally, I was happy to finally see some racing in which folks were unleashed to attack.... by far the most interesting and exciting stage race we've had in some time.
- Mark