Wiggins averaged 41.5k per hour and showed his stuff today at the Besancon Time Trial. He’s a 1’53” ahead of Cadel Evans and 2’07” ahead of Froome.
He got his first Tour bouquet at age 32 today. TeJay VanGarderen is in fourth place, 1’06” behind Wiggins and reclaimed the Best Young Rider white jersey and is back in the top 10. Nibali is now 2’23” behind.
Evans finished sixth in the 41.5 kilometer race against the clock, conceding 1:43 to stage winner Bradley Wiggins (Sky Procycling). Wiggins’s teammate, Christopher Froome, finished second and is third overall. Evans said he didn’t know what to expect going into the second of three time trials in the three-week race. “I rode not my best time trial but certainly not a bad one,” he said. “In comparison to the other time trialists like Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin and so on, it seems as though I wasn’t so far off the mark. But Sky had two very, very strong riders today.” Heading into the Tour’s first rest day Tuesday, the defending champion said his spirits remain high. “We’ll re-assess the situation day-by-day and of course we don’t give up, that’s for sure,” he said. “There’s still a lot more racing to go before Paris.”
Van Garderen said he surprised himself with his performance, which saw him riding with a degree of caution on the technical course after looking it over in the morning with Evans. “We mainly talked about not taking risks,” he said. “I told him I’d go hard, but try to keep it a regular tempo to not go too over the edge. I had to promise Cadel I wouldn’t crash. It wasn’t until the second half that I really started to ramp it up.” Powering his BMC timemachine TM01, van Garderen had the third-fastest time at both intermediate time checks (16.5 and 31.5 km), but wound up nine seconds slower than Cancellara at the finish. In the overall standings, van Garderen is now eighth, 5:14 behind, and back in the white jersey he lost in the first mountain stage Saturday.
BMC Racing Team Directeur Sportif John Lelangue said the team’s approach was no different than that of the final time trial in the 2011 Tour de France, when Evans gained the race lead on the penultimate day. “We just wanted to do like we did in Grenoble last year, like we did in former time trials in all the races this year,” he said. “We just considered it a normal time trial and did our own race. Two minutes, two weeks we have time.”
