Tour Tidbit du Jour - 7/4/2009

This year's Tour de France leads off with a time trial, but instead of a prologue, the race in Monaco serves as Stage 1. Fabian Cancellara, again, showed his absolute dominance in the Individual Time Trial, beating runner-up Alberto Contador by about 18 seconds. Contador leading Astana's big four over the 15.5 km course is a story in itself, besting Kloeden by 4 seconds, Leipheimer by 12 seconds, and Armstrong by 22 seconds.

Because Cancellara won the first stage, that means that he not only wears the overall leader's yellow jersey, but also the sprinters' green jersey for tomorrow's stage. Obviously, one man can't wear all those jerseys at once, so the second place rider in the overall gets to wear the green jersey. There's actually a hierarchy in the jerseys on who gets what, if the overall leader owns all of them at the same time, which can happen in the first week of the Tour: yellow, green, polka-dot (for the mountains leader), and white (for the best young rider under 26). What's funny about today's time trial, is that there was actually a categorized climb at the midway checkpoint, so whoever got there first is the King of the Mountains right now. At the checkpoint, Cancellara didn't even place in the top ten, well behind Contador, Columbia-HTC's Tony Martin, and Garmin-Slipstream's Bradley Wiggins. The jersey oweners after stage 1 are as follows: yellow and green - Fabian Cancellara; polka-dot - Alberto Contador; white - Roman Krueziger. Normally the green jersey would go to Contador to wear tomorrow, but since he was the outright winner of the KOM points, he has to wear that, so the green jersey goes to the third place finisher, Bradley Wiggins.