CYCLING: TOUR DE FRANCECADEL EVANS duly crossed the finish line in the yellow jersey yesterday, the first Australian winner in the history of the Tour de France. But two days earlier and at the other end of the country there had been a moment when it looked as though the game might be up for the man who had twice lost the race by less than a minute, and who had gained a reputation for attracting misfortune.
When Alberto Contador suddenly attacked, barely 20km into Friday’s stage and soon after the riders had begun to climb the lower ramps of the Col du Tele-graphe, Andy Schleck jumped away in instinctive pursuit of the defending champion. Behind them Evans wobbled, slowed to a halt and got off his bike. He looked at his back wheel in suspicion, shook it, and then remounted, getting a push from a fat man in a replica maillot jaune.
His BMC team-mate Marcus Burghardt slowed to help him with the task of rejoining the small elite group now rapidly disappearing up the road, but a minute later Evans was off his bike again. What fresh catastrophe was this?
The team car arrived, and he was handed a new machine. When he restarted, it was as part of a larger group almost two minutes behind the leaders. It looked like a potentially decisive moment.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Evans had distinguished himself as the only rider willing to respond to the attack made by Schleck on the Col d’Izoard. Ascending the final climb of the day, on the Galibier, the Australian repeatedly gestured his frustration as the other leading contenders – Contador, Ivan Basso, Samuel Sanchez and Damiano Cunego – refused to join in. So with 10km to go, and Schleck more than four minutes ahead, he went for broke, grinding it out all the way to the line and halving the Luxembourg rider’s lead, while also denying him the yellow jersey by 15 seconds.
That was the counterattack which won the Tour.
In the time trial on Saturday, he burned up the hilly course around Grenoble to finish only seven seconds behind Tony Martin, a specialist against the clock.
Three weeks away from his 35th birthday, Evans is the oldest Tour winner since the war, superseding Gino Bartali, the Italian champion, whose two victories straddled the conflict and who was 34 years and one week old at the time of his second success in 1948.
The oldest of all is Firmin Lambot, a Belgian maker of equestrian saddles, who was 36 in 1922 when he secured his second victory without winning a stage. Evans’ single stage win this year came on the first Tuesday, after a tough ride that ended on the Mur de Bretagne.
Evans was born and raised in the Northern Territory and spent his early years without television or radio, which explains his ignorance of the exploits of Phil Anderson, who became the first Australian to lead the Tour back in 1981. After moving to Geelong, near Melbourne, Evans was 14 when he watched a broadcast of Miguel Indurain winning one of his five Tours, and was hooked.
He followed Anderson’s pioneering path to Europe 10 years ago and his odyssey of misfortune and near-misses lasted until the autumn of 2009, when he demolished his reputation for being a wheelsucker with a magnificently aggressive victory in the world championship road race in Italy, close to his adopted home.
Given his age, this may have been Evans’ last realistic chance of winning the Tour. He sometimes gives the misleading impression of being inarticulate in three languages, but on Saturday night in Grenoble, when he knew he had won, he paid tribute not only to his team but to his former coach, Aldo Sassi, who died of brain cancer last December, aged 51.
Each Tour is full of stories, but the 98th edition was an unusually rich feuilleton, with barely a humdrum moment in its 21 episodes.
To many, however, the soul of this Tour belonged to Thomas Voeckler, his lieutenant Pierre Rolland and the rest of their modestly financed Europcar team, whose successes – 10 days in yellow for Voeckler, the white jersey in Paris for Rolland – represented a marvellous feat of French resistance in a race of many winners.
Guardian Service
