A bruised and sore Cadel Evans took the yellow jersey at the Tour de France after Leonardo Piepoli of Italy won a punishing climb through the Pyrenees to capture the 10th stage on Monday.
Evans, the 31-year-old Silence Lotto leader and one of the favorites, swiped the race lead from Kim Kirchen and has a one-second lead over Frank Schleck.
The performance was even more striking because Evans took the lead a day after crashing badly in Sunday’s stage, leaving the Australian with cuts and bruises and causing him to momentarily fear that his Tour might be over.
PHOTO: AFP
“Yesterday, I was at what’s for me been my Tour low. And today, up until this point in the Tour, it’s been my Tour high,” Evans said. “It’s a bit an emotional rollercoaster to say the least.”
Evans’ eyes welled up with tears as he donned the yellow jersey on a podium at a post-race ceremony. It was the first time he has ever held the Tour lead, having finished second behind Alberto Contador of Spain last year.
“I still can’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it now and I couldn’t believe it then on the podium,” he said.
Evans took the lead into the first of two rest days yesterday.
The three-week race finishes in Paris on July 27 — and he says he wants to try to stay in yellow until then.
Evans only rarely attacked the other pre-race favorites who distanced themselves from the main pack in the 156-km stage from Pau to Hautacam. The stage featured the passes of Tourmalet and Hautacam — climbs so hard they are beyond classification.
Piepoli finished a split second ahead of his Saunier Duval teammate, Juan Jose Cobo Acebo of Spain. Schleck was third, 28 seconds back, and Evans and several other title threats trailed 2 minutes, 17 seconds behind.
Evans came into the stage six seconds behind Kirchen, who struggled up the Hautacam and finished 4:19 off Piepolo’s pace — falling to seventh overall and ending his four-day run in yellow.
Christian Vande Velde, the Garmin-Chipotle team leader who kept in Evans’ bunch, held on to third — 38 seconds back. Russia’s Denis Menchov — the man who Evans has said he fears most — also kept up with the Australian and is 57 seconds back in fifth. Carlos Sastre is sixth, 1:28 back.
The day’s biggest loser was Alejandro Valverde, the Spanish national champion seen as a potential title threat.
He couldn’t keep up with his main rivals up the first climb up Tourmalet, and continued to lose time. He finished 5:52 behind Piepoli and now trails Evans by 4:41.
“It’s finished for the podium,” Caisse d’Epargne sporting director Eusebio Unzue said of Valverde’s chances of a top-three finish.
History may be playing in Evans’ favor. In the three Tour stages to finish at the Hautacam, the rider who emerged from the stage up its punishing 14.4km ascent in yellow kept the shirt all the way to the finish in Paris — Miguel Indurain in 1994, Bjarne Riis in 1996, and Lance Armstrong in 2000.
“Like the others who took the yellow jersey on the Hautacam, I hope I can continue in it,” Evans said.
Remy di Gregorio, a 22-year-old Frenchman who crashed out of his first Tour last year with a broken elbow, led the pack over the 17.7km Tourmalet pass — the longer of the stage’s two massive climbs.
The group of favorites ultimately overtook di Gregorio early in the climb up the Hautacam, with just under 12km to go — when the leaders also put on a gap on promising Andy Schleck, Frank’s younger brother and Team CSC teammate.
Mark Cavendish of Britain, who won the fifth and eighth stages, and Danny Pate of the US crashed early in the stage. They got back on their bikes, and Cavendish was treated by the race doctor for an injury to his left shoulder.
Yury Trofimov of Russia quit the race after catching a cold and feeling fatigue, Bouygues Telecom sporting director Didier Rous said. The pack now includes 169 riders, 11 fewer than at the start of the race.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier