Pre Tour racing update

All the races running up to the Tour each year are always used by the top riders to hone their pre tour fitness/sharpness. The 2 big ones are of course Le Criterium du Dauphine and Le Tour de Suisse, both of which are currently ongoing.

Le Dauphine ends tomorrow with a final day in the mountains and Le Tour de Suisse just kicked off today with another 8 days of racing to go.

Janez Brajkovic of Team Radioshack won the Dauphine last year but this year has failed to impress. Currently in the lead heading into the final day is Team Sky's Bradley Wiggins with an impressive margin of 0:01:26 over a dwindling Cadel Evans.

The race this year has featured some excellent climbing (as is expected) to test the rider's legs and those of note certainly include Cristophe Kern of the newly formed Team Europcar, who rode to an impressive win yesterday in the mountains and is now sitting 5th in the GC. Team Europcar has featured heavily throughout this year's Dauphine and are leading the team standings by 12 seconds over Astana. Centered around French heavyweight Tommy Voeckler I suspect they will be an aggressive force at this years tour.

Leading the points classification heading into the final day is Spaniard Joaquim Rodriguez, who after a mighty Giro D'Italia where he finished 5th and an impressive 8th place at last years tour is showing strong form. He took today's stage in the high mountains with a strong ride up the final 11.2km HC climb to Le Collet d'Allevard finishing 31 seconds ahead of an almost as strong looking Robert Gessink and Jurgen Van Den Broeck a further 8 seconds back.

Further East at the start of the 75th annual Tour de Suisse reigning time trial world champion Fabian Cancellara took the win in the opening 7.3km prologue of his home event. Reigning champion Frank Shleck is also returning this year alongside his younger brother and tour favourite Andy Shleck - it is guessed Andy will be riding in support of his older brother this week, with the tables being turned at next months Tour. That said I wouldn't count out a strong but rudderless Team Radioshack (now without their heroic leader Armstrong) but with a mighty group consisting of Andreas Kloden, Christopher Horner and Levi Leipheimer all vying for top spot heading into next month's race I suspect quite the battle with the Shleck's over the next few days.

The final piece of news for the day is that reigning Tour and Giro champion Alberto Contador, the newly crowned leader of Team Saxo-Bank SunGard, has announced today that while still not fully recovered from last month's challenging Giro D'Italia he will be on the start line of the tour next month. Though with continued controversy surrounding his last year's failed TDF drug test it is unsure how long his current racing licence will last before a possible ban is imposed. If so all win's from that date back to and including the 2010 Tour de France will be forfeit.

While some teams are beginning to announce tentative tour rosters I suspect most will not be released until after June 19th, with most coming around the week of June 20th. Until then I will continue everyone up to date with the current happenings in the important pre Tour races.

Mike