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93rd Tour de France - presented by

1 - 23 July

le Tour: Team CSC versus T-Mobile

Main

The 93rd Tour de France is right around the corner and the excitement is building by the day. The way things are shaping up, it appears it will be a battle royale between two very powerful squads: CSC and T-Mobile. You might be asking yourself why have we left out Discovery Channel? After all, they have won the Tour seven of the last seven years. It is true, Discovery Channel, with Lance Armstrong, rewrote the handbook on riding and winning the Tour. BiciRace.com, though, feels they are in a transition period and their two aces, Yaroslav Popovych and George Hincapie don't have the pedigree to beat neither Ivan Basso nor Jan Ullrich.

Below, we've broken down a few components of each team and compared them to see which of them come up aces.

Ivan Basso vs. Jan Ullrich

Ivan Basso is the man of the hour. Quite simply, he has the full package. He can climb with the best, is one of the top crono men in the world and his confidence is sky high.

Climbing and time trialing are easily quantifiable, but mental toughness is not so easy to measure. It's an even harder skill to master. It's what separated Armstrong from his rivals. The Texan had it and his rivals didn't, and it showed. When Armstrong crashed on Luz Ardiden in 2003 or when he bonked on the Col de Joux-Plane in 2000 it was the Texan's mental tenacity that saved him. Basso has endured some hardship the last few years and it has given him that mental edge that now separates him from his rivals.

Ullrich is undisputedly one of the best, but he has always demonstrated a fragile personality. Ullrich's childhood was equally as tough as Armstrong's, but he didn't come out of it with that chip on his shoulder like Armstrong did, with the desire to crush anything that stood as an obstacle. Don't get us wrong, that's probably not a bad thing anywhere outside the cutthroat world of cycling but it does not do him any favors when he's trying to win bike races.

Bjarne Riis vs. Rudy Pevenage

Aside from being a sport of strength and endurance, cycling is very much a tactical battle. CSC's boss, Bjarne Riis, is a tactician par excellence. Next to perhaps Johan Bruyneel, he has no equal. He also has an uncanny knack at motivating his troops and yielding unbelievable results out of them. A lot of people joke about Riis being the cycling equivalent of Anthony Robbins, but you can't very well argue with his results, can you?

Ullrich is the perennial underachiever. We respect Ullrich tremendously as a rider, but no director he's ridden for has been able to get the German to exploit the vast amount of talent that he possesses.

Rudy Pevenage is like a father to Ullrich. They have been inseparable for the German's entire career. Cycling is about exploring that dark unknown place within yourself. Pevenage has not been able to get Ullrich to find that place. Basso, on the other hand, has found this place and learned to embrace it with the guidance of Riis.

Supporting Cast

T-Mobile is like the dream team of modern day cycling due to its vast financial resources. On paper, they always have one of the strongest squads in the race, but they lack cohesion and it shows in their results. If you take Vinokourov and Zabel out of the equation, their results over the last several years are pretty meager given the depth of talent.

A few of the riders likely to make the Tour team for T-Mobile: Michael Rogers, Oscar Sevilla, Patrik Sinkewitz and Andreas Klöden, are all iffy at best. Klöden had a brilliant 2004 Tour, but has been out of action 10 weeks this year due to injury. Rogers, Sevilla and Sinkewitz have shown glimpses of hope in the past, but you wouldn't be out of line in saying that they are inconsistent, and not the types of riders you would want to use as a foundation for your Tour de France squad.

CSC's arsenal is stacked deep with talent. More importantly though, each rider knows Basso is the man and can't hold any energy back for themselves. Individual aspirations have no place at CSC and every rider knows it implicitly.

The Danish Squadra has the advantage of going into the Tour de France with a phenomenally successful year so far. They have taken prestigious wins all over the calendar and there is just that much less pressure to perform at the Tour than the squads that haven't shone as well.
- Paco