Interesting stage. I was hoping for either Pellizotti or Astarloza to take it. Great run to the finish (except of course J. Voigt, ouch that looked brutal hope he gets better soon).
Probably tomorrow, Pellizotti will have a go at the early mountains again to cement his leadership. Most likely there won't be any more changes in the polka dot and green jersey until the end (same for team competition by the way).
With that out of the way, GC and young rider classification looked interesting today. The bad news first: whatever shred of hope Cadel had for the GC is gone the way of the dodo. He complained having a bad day on Sunday (where he looked more or less his own self), and totally blew it today. Could be he's actually sick, who knows. Menchov showing where you end up riding clean (race-clean, not career-clean). Tony Martin a jour sans. Have to find out what he was saying. Sastre again did not look all that convincing. He definitely came back but doesn't seem to be holding up all that well this year. I wonder what he will be able to do on the Ventoux.
On the other end of the spectrum are Contador, Nibali and Wiggins. Great ride by the three, they could follow all accelerations effortlessly. Very impressive.
Then we have Saxo and Astana. Clearly something was different today compared to Sunday when Kloden followed the Schlecks and Contador instead of towing LA. When the gap opened so rapidly, I thought for a while that LA might have totally bonked and therefore let Kloden go, but he came back very well once it got flatter and the speed in the MJ group dropped. Still, I see it more a weakness than a strength. First, he couldn't know for sure how things would develop and second, he did drag other riders at least part of the way back up. Now the MJ group had 6 of the top 8 riders (only LA and Le Mevel were missing and later Frank dropped), so Alberto wouldn't have made up time relative to the closest rivals (the closest would have been Sastre with ~4') but still. AC had a teammate in Kloden and said later in an interview that he didn't need LA.
The Schlecks tried to make the race Interesting but ultimately failed. Andy is 40" off the podium and 49" off LA. And he will lose time on Thursday. It seemed to me that Frank didn't quite have the legs to set up Andy the way they wanted, while Contador still had Kloden up there, so they essentially stopped their move. Then again Jens Voigt was also up there and helped. I guess that considering the long descent and how all groups came closer together in the end, it is understandable that they conserved energy for tomorrow and Thursday.
