The Pyrenees were there as a backdrop for yet another useless stage of this Tour that doesn't decide to excite. Yesterday in Foix, to fill the news of the day, the stranger who had amused himself by scattering the Mur de Peguère with pitons had taken care of it. Today in Pau, standings still unchanged, there is little or nothing to tell beyond the name of the winner: Pierrick Fédrigo. For this Frenchman of Fdj-Pigmat, born in 1978, it is the fourth stage won in his career on the Tour.
Not a small fault of this stalemate in which the race ended is also the organizers who have designed a Tour that instead of facing the mountains often runs along them. It is true that after tomorrow's rest there will be the great Pyrenean ride followed by a second stage with a high altitude finish in Peyragudes, but one wonders if this is enough to balance a route that never seems to penalize climbers as this year and favor the time trial specialists. The feeling is growing within the caravan that Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, wanted to assist Team Sky and its captain who had had one obsession since the beginning of the season: winning the Tour.
And Bradley Wiggins has been winning the Tour up to now in a carriage, the time trial was enough for him to establish the hierarchies in his favor and then pedal without ever getting off the saddle in the Alps (faced this year, compared to other editions of the Tour, really with the scale). From Liège to today, two attacks by Vincenzo Nibali on the ascent of La Toussuire come to mind; always in the same alpine stage a more exhausted than convincing sprint by Evans on the Col du Grandon then paid dearly in the final when Froome suddenly took off, a sprint nipped in the bud for Team Sky's team reasons: in sixteen stages it's really too much little.
Then in the standings Wiggins distanced rivals with the richest record of his own such as, for example, Frank Schleck (11th at 9'45”), Denis Menchov (16th at 17'41”), Scarponi (21st at 20'32”) and Ivan Basso (28th at 45'13”) depends not so much on the strength of the Englishman, who beyond the time trial in Besançon never gave the impression of being a superman, but on the disarming weakness and resignation of the others. Wiggins was also able to benefit from a team, the Sky, which put all the men at his service while also sacrificing the ambitions of Marc Cavendish, the world champion, king of sprinters, often reduced to a bottle bearer for the yellow jersey.
Now, after the rest in Pau, there are the real Pyrenees: two days on legendary hills which the 2012 Tour relies on to redeem two weeks of boredom and not to go down in history as one of the most obvious and least fought editions (the many withdrawals, as many as 40 to date, are mainly due to falls). It's the last chance for Vincenzo Nibali (however good his Tour to date) and Cadel Evans to attack Wiggins. Without obviously forgetting Chris Froome, a running sphinx, the lieutenant who, from what little we have seen so far, has the legs to beat his captain.
