| | By Fred Rodriguez
Special to ABC Sports Online
American cyclist Fred Rodriguez is riding for the Italian Mapei team -- ranked the number one team in the world for the past three years. In just his fifth year riding professionally, Rodriguez won the US Professional Championships in Philadelphia on June 4. Throughout the Tour de France, Rodriguez will take you through his first Tour de France -- sharing with you the ins and outs of the world's preeminent cycling event.
TOURS, France -- Today's race started out a lot more relaxed than the last couple of days. I was actually hanging back, talking to a couple of other American riders, when suddenly a small break happened At the same time, ONCE's Laurent Jalabert stopped for a "rest stop," so to speak. While there aren't any rules against that, it kind of goes against the etiquette of the sport.
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Members of the lead pack ride past wheat fields on their way towards Tours. |
So it took ONCE a couple minutes to re-organize, and there was about a 20-second gap before they started chasing. At that point, I moved up to the front to see if I could jump across, but it looked like ONCE had things under control. I decided to wait and see if they could bring Jalabert back. The next thing you know, it went from 15 seconds to about a minute in no time at all.
We had a couple of our guys try to go up and help out, but with 10-strong, ONCE had way too much motivation to pull away. At that point, ONCE realized that they weren't the only team with a lot to lose --U.S.P.S. had no one in there, Mapei had no one in there, a lot of teams had no one in there.
We then hit kind of a stall mode, riding about 20 kilometers-per-hour while the breakers were riding at about 60 kilometers-per-hour. They ended up getting about 15 minutes ahead.or something, so the rest of the field started arguing and debating who would get up there and pull. But no one was willing to do it -- they all wanted to wait to make a push.
Finally, Bonjour, one of the French teams that had nobody up there in the lead pack, made a push with Team Polti and a few guys from U.S. Postal. Next thing you know, there were about 20 guys up there pulling. But at that point, it was going to be impossible to make up the 10 or 12 minutes; all they could do was control it or get some of the time back.
As we crossed the halfway point, there was a nasty crash that took out Stuart O'Grady and a couple of the Credit Agricole guys. A bunch of guys went down, and it split the field. At that point, the guy at the front decided that the split would motivate more people to work, so they really put their guns down and were giving it all they had. We started taking time off the break really fast, but I think the guys pulling simply dug too deep and were out of gas with about 50 kilometers left.
It was a really hard day for us. Lance Armstrong approached me earlier and said, "Tour de France, there's nothing like this." While there wasn't a crazy finale to today's race like there has been the last couple of days, it was still grueling. There's usually a lot of motivation and psyching up to do for the finale of a race, but it was pretty relaxed at the end today.
It wasn't a particularly satisfying day for us just because we didn't have anybody on the break, but we're mostly here for the stages. With myself, Tom Steels, Stefano Zanini and Max van Heeswijk, we have some stages coming up that could definitely suit us for another stage victory.
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Rodriguez Diary No. 3
Rodriguez Diary No. 2
Rodriguez Diary No. 1
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