The list of teams picked to ride the Tour de France each year always throws up some controversy. New teams like Radio Shack and Team Sky have arrived this year seemingly to the detriment of smaller setups such as Skil-Shimano and Vacansoleil. Although the teams that boast overall contenders like Lance Armstrong and Bradley Wiggins are brand new, they are at the Tour because the have riders such as these.

Footon-Servetto do not have such riders and consequently are on the receiving end of some animosity when opinions are aired on which teams should be in the race. The Spanish Pro Tour team will be fielding eight riders in France this year who have never ridden the Tour before. This fact will no doubt irk some successful Tour riders who will not be at the start line like the Feillu brothers or Jimmy Casper, but there are plenty of riders on other teams who also have never been at the Tour de France. Here’s a run down of five such riders who, perhaps surprisingly, will be riding their first Tour:

Michael Barry – Probably the most prominent example of a rider finally racing his first Tour de France at the ripe age of 34. While he has never ridden the Tour, he is no stranger to Grand Tours having ridden five Vueltas and four Giros completing three of each. He has been part of two team time trial stage wins, one in the Giro and one in the Vuelta. He has also been part of a team which supported a rider to overall success in each of these Grand Tours. He was a team mate to Paolo Savoldelli when he won the Giro in 2005 and he was also part of Roberto Heras’ winning squad at the Vuelta in 2003.

Both of these victories came whilst riding for the US Postal Team of Lance Armstrong. Barry was a team mate of the Texan’s for four of his Tour winning years between 2002 and 2005 but was never picked as part of the Tour roster. In his 13th season he is finally getting his chance to try and add the Tour to his list of ‘wins’ as a domestique to Bradley Wiggins. However, a shadow lingers over Barry’s participation as he is one of the riders whom Floyd Landis named as part of his US Postal related allegations. There have been reports this morning that two of the accused have co-operated with the ongoing federal investigation, although neither have been named. Depending on how this investigation plays out, this could also be Barry’s last Tour de France. He will be one of two Canadians in the race along with Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin-Transitions.

Jeremy Hunt – The twice former British road race champion turned 36 earlier this year. He will be riding his first Tour de France as a domestique for Thor Hushovd on the Cervélo Test Team. He is certainly not as decorated as Michael Barry in Grand Tours having ridden 2 Vueltas and only one Giro, managing to finish one of each. He is undoubtedly in the team for his ability over the cobbles and his experience racing in treacherous conditions which, weather dependent, the peloton may encounter over the first few stages.

He has finished in the top 20 of Paris-Roubaix for the past two seasons and often puts in podium worthy performances in semi-classics such as the Scheldeprijs and Dwars Door Vlaanderen. While he will probably form some sort of lead out train for Hushovd, the Norwegian is uber capable of handling himself over cobbles. Hunt will most likely be employed to help Carlos Sastre over what will be the most alien of terrain to the tiny Spaniard.

Steve Cummings – Now aged 29, Team Sky’s Steve Cummings is another British rider attempting his first Tour de France. In the Bradley Wiggins mould he is a former track star turned road rider. He has a Rainbow Jersey and an Olympic Silver Medal in the team pursuit discipline (the latter won as a team mate of Wiggins). He has ridden three Giri d’Italia, completing one each for Discovery Channel, Barloworld and this year with his new Team Sky where he helped the team to 2nd place in the team time trial. He was part of the Discovery Channel team when Alberto Contador won the Tour in 2007 but wasn’t on the final list of nine riders.

He claimed to have a torrid time at Barloworld where was forced to participate in races he had no interest in and missed out on races in which he harboured desires to start. He seems to be finally happy now as part of the British Team Sky setup. Perhaps expectedly for a former track rider, he’s capable of putting in a good time trial, his best result being an 11th place in the Olympic Games time trial in Beijing two years ago. However, his main use for this Tour will be to shelter Wiggins on the flat. He is a big man and is no stranger to cobbled races. He will form an invaluable shield to Wiggins in his efforts to save energy over the three weeks.

Matti Breschel – A theme is beginning to emerge here as Breschel is another cobbled specialist. The presence of these chunks of rock on Stage 3 are forcing directeur sportifs to select classics specialists over their regular G.C. domestiques. While Breschel is still only 25, he has been around for a good while having ridden his first Paris-Roubaix at the age of 20. Perhaps the main reason it is surprising he has never ridden the Tour before is Bjarne Riis’ penchant for blooding young riders in the big races. However, he will now get his chance to shine next week where, along with Cancellara, O’Grady and Voigt he will form a formidable sqaudron to protect overall contenders Frank and Andy Schleck.

He has ridden and finished two Vueltas and a Giro already in his career taking a stage win of the 2008 Vuelta along the way. He is morphing into a serious contender for the major Spring classics. He already has top 10s in Paris-Roubaix, Gent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders to his name. He was a major favourite to win one of these races last April but a combination of mechanical mishaps and being Fabian Cancellara’s team mate scuppered any chance he had of success. While Team Saxo Bank’s scope for stage hunting will be limited due to their main goal of launching the Schlecks to overall success, if Cancellara finds himself in yellow after the prologue don’t be surprised if Breschel is sent up the road in a break on Stage 1 or 2. The Danish squad will not want to waste their energy defending the jersey and chasing down breaks so early on in the Tour.

Dimitri Champion – At aged only 26, perhaps it isn’t too surprising that Champion has yet to ride the Tour de France. The most surprising fact about this rider is that he is the only French national champion since World War II who has never ridden the Tour (the most aptly named national champion ever, I’m sure you’ll agree). He won the tricolor whilst racing for the lowly continental team Bretagne-Schuller. He had previously ridden with Bouyges Telecom where he rode two Vueltas a Espana, finishing one. He can ride a time trial, coming close to winning the French national TT on a couple of occasions (although perhaps that not saying much). He has also finished 9th in a Vuelta time trial.

But, like most French riders, his first love is a breakaway. His French AG2R team has no G.C. rider as such and will be majorly in the market for stage wins. Along with Nicolas Roche and to a lesser extent the recovering Rinaldo Nocentini, Champion should be afforded leeway from his Ag2R team to go up the road in search for a French stage win. The stage to Gap should suit as it comes after two high alpine stages and looks a dead cert for a breakaway to succeed, and it just happens to fall on the 14th July! Watch this space…

The Tour de Suisse and the Critérium du Dauphiné are over and there are currently dozens of National Championships taking place throughout the world. This can mean only one thing, the Tour de France is almost upon us. As such, plenty of teams have finalised their Tour de France rosters while the remaining teams are expected to do so in the coming days. Unfortunately, like last year, there will only be one Irish rider present on the startline in Rotterdam. And like last year, this rider is Nicolas Roche who has recovered sufficiently from a hamstring problem which forced him out of the Tour of Romandy back in April.

Dan Martin and Philip Deignan are two riders who were hoping to make their Tour de France debuts this year but who will now both be sitting out the Grand Départ for different reasons. Martin was given the opportunity to ride the Giro d’Italia as Garmin’s G.C. leader. He took this opportunity and impressed on the two toughest mountain stages of the race, finishing 9th on the stage up Monte Zoncolan and taking 20th in the Plan de Corones mountain time trial. He also managed to make the huge split on Stage 11 when the race was turned on its head. Still only 23 years old, it was decided that racing the Tour directly after the Giro would be too much too soon. He’s due to ride the Irish National Championships Road Race on Sunday 27th June and then take a well deserved rest so he can come back to racing re-energised and focused on the Vuelta a Espana which he should be riding for the 2nd time this September.

Deignan on the other hand, was a victim of misfortune rather than any race related decisions. He suffered from a knee injury early on in the season. Having recovered sufficiently from that he was then forced out of the Tour of California with food poisoning. Most recently he abandoned the Tour de Suisse, again due to illness. He has said via twitter that he’ll spend his time off the bike during the July trying to find out what is causing him to fall ill all the time so he can correct the problem and focus on the remainder of the season. Who knows, depending on Roche’s plans we could end up seeing three Irish riders take part in the Vuelta a Espana.

I’ve bought all the Tour preview mags I can get my hands on, and have also read the many many previews available online. Most articles seem to be in agreement that Contador is so dominant in both the mountains and the time trials that the only way he can possibly lose the Tour will be due to a mishap over the cobbles on Stage 3 or it will be due to the strength (or lack thereof) of his team. But is his team really that bad? I’ve taken a look at the Grand Tour credentials of the 8 team mates of each of the overall favourites. For each team the average age, number of Tour starts, number of Tour stage wins, number of Grand Tour starts, number of Grand Tour stage wins and the number of Tour rookies have all been taken into account:

Details of the previous Tour de France and Grand Tour performances of the G.C. contenders team mates. (Information on Garmin's Tour roster was not available. Astana's roster has also not yet been finalised, see cyclingstartlists.com for details).

For me, one of the most striking details is the lack of experience on Bradley Wiggins’ Team Sky. They will start with four riders who have never ridden the Tour de France before, as well as Geraint Thomas who has only ridden one. They have the least Grand Tour Starts and the least Tour de France starts (apart from Liquigas, surprisingly). Notwithstanding the fact their designated leader, Bradley Wiggins at the age of 30, has only completed two Tours de France. At the risk of repeating myself, as I have posted about this before, Wiggins reckons he has made a move ‘from Wigan Athletic to Man United‘. I can’t help but think the opposite is more applicable to his current situation.

Admittedly, Wiggins’ team will be more than capable of guiding him through the hectic first three stages across Holland and Belgium. Edvald Boassan Hagen, although still only 23, is already a winner of Gent-Wevelgem. Juan Antonio Flecha is a perennial podium finisher in races like Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. Both Geraint Thomas and Steve Cummings are also no strangers to cobbled races. Wiggins himself has the most experience over the cobbles of all the G.C. contenders.

Cadel Evans has said in this month’s Pro Cycling that “It’ll be more important to have a good team on the flat stages than in the mountains”. I’m not sure I agree with Evans on this one but it seems that Team Sky and Dave Brailsford agree with him completely as they have picked a team shockingly short of mountain support.

The two main domestiques that Wiggins will look to in the mountains will be Thomas Lovkvist and Simon Gerrans. Lovkvist is a solid rider who will be capable of staying with the leaders until the final climb of the day. However, there is also the issue of the Swede’s personal ambitions. Before Wiggins jumped on the Sky bandwagon late in the day, Lovkvist was under the impression he would be the Tour team leader for Sky.

Although he will now be aware he is working for Wiggins, he has said that he still harbours hopes of a high G.C. placing: “When we come to the Tour de France, I will be riding for the general classification”. This is bad news for Wiggins who needs his team mates to leave everything out on the road for him. A team mate who works for a leader most of the day but holds back some energy for himself so he might finish in the second group on the road is not ideal.

Then there’s Simon Gerrans who wasn’t picked for Cervélo’s Tour de France team last year, despite winning a Tour stage in 2008 and a stage of the Giro in 2009. The reason he was left at home was because the Cervélo team had been divided in two. One half was a lead out team geared to help Thor Hushovd win stages and the Green Jersey while the other half was a mountain team tasked with propelling Carlos Sastre to overall glory. Simon Gerrans, he was told, fit into neither. While Gerrans is a solid rider when the road goes uphill, he will always be hunting for stage wins for himself. He is a good rider to append to an already solid list of mountain domestiques but he is not good enough to form the crux of Wiggins’ mountains team. But when you look at the riders who Team Sky haven’t picked for the Tour, you begin to understand why they were so desperate to sign Vincenzo Nibali last winter.

Alberto Contador on the other hand, is the only Tour contender who can call upon a team mate who has won a Grand Tour of his own. In fact, in Oscar Pereiro and Alexander Vinokourov, Contador has two former Grand Tour winning team mates. While Pereiro’s Tour de France win in 2006 is seen as a default victory and the product of a freak breakaway akin to the one witnessed on Stage 11 of the Giro this year, he has also finished 10th at the Tour on three occassions. He has been hampered by injury for the past two seasons, but should he stay fit and healthy, Pereiro will be a valuable asset to Contador.

Additionally, should Vinokourov be persuaded to ride as a team mate rather than attacking for no apparent reason (as he was known to do when part of the T-Mobile team which included Kloden and Ullrich), the Kazakh should regularly make the final selection and provide a useful pawn for Contador. Although he is bound to have a stinker of a day (or two) along the way, he always does. Contador can also call upon Paolo Tiralongo a veteran of 13 Grand Tours and Benjamin Noval who has ridden eight, three of those as part of a Tour de France winning team.

I’ll come back to the table above in a further post and discuss the chances of other teams, but for the moment I’ll conclude by saying: Contador’s team for the opening stages looks decidedly weak (although he can rely on Maxim Iglinskiy who finished 8th in both Milan San Remo and the Tour of Flanders this year). However, if the Spaniard is to make it through to France unscathed and with his team intact, it’s hard to see anything stopping him. On the other hand, if Wiggins sails through the opening stages, he may look around the team bus and long for Christian Vande Velde, David Zabriskie, David Millar, Johan van Summeren, Dan Martin and Ryder Hesjedal instead of a group of classics riders he will then be stuck with. The Belgian born Wiggins could find himself horribly isolated by the time the Tour reaches the leg aching stages through the Pyrenees.

There is only 17 days left until the Tour de France gets underway in Rotterdam. Teams are finalising their nine man rosters and riders have been fine tuning their preparations at the Criterium de Dauphiné and the Tour de Suisse. While others have been quietly going about their business since the Giro. In this month’s Cycle Sport magazine, Tour director Christian Prudhomme had this to say about the G.C. contenders for the Tour:

Overall, nobody is surefire value for the Tour this year – there’s some degree of uncertainty about their condition, either because it’s better than expected, slightly worse, or because, simply, they’ve kept it under wraps. And that sort of uncertainty can only be good.

This is true, the Dauphiné and the Tour de Suisse provide an odd mix of racing. It’s hard to tell from rider to rider whether they are racing hard because they know they won’t be team leader for the Tour and that this is their opportunity to shine, or whether they are racing easy because they are saving themselves for a more important goal at the Tour.

A case in point is Alberto Contador last year. He tried to win every race he entered until he reached the Dauphiné where he seemed to make a deal with fellow Spaniard Alejandro Valverde. The deal was that Contador would give Vavlverde a hand winning the Dauphiné if Valverde would return the favour at the Tour. Contador upheld his part of the bargain. Valverde, due to his involvement in Operacion Puerto and subsequent doping ban, did not.

However, there was no deal in place this year as Contador, despite declaring otherwise, really seemed to want to win the Dauphiné, a race he is yet to win. He put in attack after attack on Alpe d’Huez trying to rid himself of Jani Brajkovic but failed in his attempts. He was ulimately beaten by a man who out performed him in a time trial and defended successfully in the mountains. Replace the words ‘time trial’ with the words ‘over the cobbles’ and we could have ourselves a way to beat Contador.

During Lance Armstrong’s Tour winning years he perfected a formula which led him to the yellow jersey in July. He rarely won a race before June, a month in which he would ride either the Dauphiné or the Tour de Suisse. He would ride these races to win, announcing his form (which he had honed on various recces of Tour stages) and his intentions to his Tour rivals. Along with Eddy Merckx he’s the only rider to have won both a Tour de France/Tour de Suisse and a Tour de France/Dauphiné double.

However, there have been more subtle approaches, such as that of Carlos Sastre. In his Tour winning year of 2008 he managed two top 10 placings in the early season Tour of Murcia, but apart from these two exceptions he didn’t finish in the top 20 again that year until he reached the Tour de France. On pre-Tour form Sastre was not a standout candidate, but he had ridden himself into form over the course of the whole year and had kept quiet about it. So quiet that perhaps his rivals underestimated him when it came to the stage up Alpe d’Huez.

So how are all the Tour contenders faring so far this year?

Results so far this year of the 2010 Tour de France Contenders

From the vieweing the above table, it’s clear that yet again Contador is having the best season so far of all the Tour G.C. contenders. Despite what Prudhomme may like to think, Contador is most certainly surefire value for this year’s Tour. He has shown certain weaknesses this year, such as ‘only’ finishing 6th in the Dauphiné time trial, not being able to drop Brajkovic on Alpe d’Huez, mistiming his finishing sprint up the Muur de Huy at Fléche Wallonee and a generally poor performance at the Criterium International. But these are minor complaints and do not constitute enough to suggest that Contador may be misfiring this year. The facts are that he has ridden four week-long stage races this year, winning three of them and finishing 2nd in the other (a race he said he wasn’t trying to win anyway).

The only other Tour contenders to have won a stage race at all this season are Roman Kreuziger who won the Giro di Sardegna way back in February and Ivan Basso who won an immensely entertaining Giro d’Italia. Both are team mates riding for Liquigas. Basso initially suggested that he would ride the Giro to win and subsequently ride the Tour in support of his team mates. But having won the Giro he has changed his tune sightly, now saying he hopes to win the Tour. Of the other Liquigas leaders, Pellizotti has been suspended due to irregularities in his biological passport and Vincenzo Nibali seems unlikely to ride the Tour having been called up to the Giro at the last minute. Kreuziger has made no secret of his intentions to find a new team for next year, so rather than support a rider who is planning to leave the team, it may in fact be the case that the Liquigas management will throw the weight of the team behind Basso yet again, who will be aiming to become the first man to achieve the Giro/Tour double since his compatriot Marco Pantani 12 years ago.

Cadel Evans has had a stellar season, and besides the riders mentioned above, is the only other contender to have won a race this season (not including stage wins in stage races)  with his victory in Fléche Wallonne. History suggests that Evans performs better in his 2nd Grand Tour of any season. He performed admirably at the Giro finishing 5th and winning the points classification. He oft complained while at Lotto that he didn’t have a team to adequately support him during a three week Tour. He left Lotto over the winter to join BMC, who have shown they are certainly no better than Lotto when it comes to lending Evans support in the mountains.

I can’t help but wonder what Evans may have been able to achieve in his career if he had ever been part of a team built around him full of quality domestiques. Instead he finds himself yet again in a team which seems to be built more for the classics than the Grand Tours. But despite this, Evans seems used to it and proved highly capable at the Giro. So if it holds true that he’ll be better in the 2nd Grand Tour of the year, he has a real chance of becoming the first World Champion to finish on the Tour podium since Gianni Bugno 18 years ago.

Carlos Sastre has taken his slow steady build up to the Tour de France to unprecedented levels this year. He didn’t start his season until the Volta a Catalunya in late March. Between that and the Giro d’Italia, the only other race in which he partook was the one day classic Liége-Bastogne-Liége. The Spaniard is 35 now and further Tour success seems beyond him at this stage. Also, having suffered a herniated disc on his way to 8th place at the Giro, he looks unlikely to start this year’s Tour. Other riders who I mentioned in a previous post have suffered from illness or injury this year are Armstrong, Menchov, Vande Velde and Andy Schleck.

It’s worth noting that despite the addition of the cobbled sections in this year’s Tour, the only rider who decided to race a cobbled classic this year was Lance Armstrong who finished in the top 30 at the Tour of Flanders. Contador has been seen out training on the cobbles with former specialist Peter van Petegem. But nothing beats the experience of racing over them in race conditions which is why I find the lack of Tour contenders at the cobbled classics surprising. Particularly Bradley Wiggins, who usually opts to ride one or two cobbled races every year but decided to stay away this year. The Brit will be aiming to improve on last year’s 4th place. He’s kept fairly shtum so far with an underwhelming performance at the Giro. Perhaps a bit of sandbagging afoot?

Laurent Fignon said of last year’s Tour that it was like an episode of Columbo. We all knew that Contador was going to win the Tour but the entertainment lay in how he would win it. While Contador will again be the pre-race favourite, with so many contenders on such an array of teams, I can’t help but think the 2010 Tour will be more like Poirot, where we are all kept in the dark until the entire climax has unfolded in front of us.