Contador dismisses double dream

At a Tour de France designed to offer the best revenge duel between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck - more mountainous to favor both riders, fewer time trials to give hope to the Luxembourger - was eventually won by an altogether quieter rider, the king of patience and coherence, Cadel Evans.

The Australian put in the kind of performance patented by Miguel Indurain during his five-year reign at the Tour; resistant in the mountains, clever in the covering-up of his faults, in his efficiency and in his management of the bad moments when he kept his head, and brilliant in the time trial. Evans, at 34 years and five months old, is the oldest postwar winner of the Tour.

That, at least, is one way of viewing it, the obligatory way - as obligatory as the eulogizing of the champion. "Evans deserved it," says Contador, the winner of the two previous Tours. "He didn't make any mistakes. He was the strongest rider."

There are other ways to view it, of course - for example, by fixating on the defeated, that Evans won simply because Contador lost. It could be said that the Schleck brothers were beaten because they underestimated Evans and overestimated Contador to the point of paralyzing fear, which stopped them from launching an attack in the Pyrenees where, like a condemned man who receives a final-hour stay of execution, the rider from Pinto regained hope. The evening before, Contador had even considered quitting the race: "The day after the second fall [on Stage 9], when I got caught up with [Vladimir] Karpets and I hit the same knee I damaged in the previous one, I was very concerned. But I decided to continue."

His rivals spared Contador in the Pyrenees, giving his dream of a Giro-Tour double new life - had he won, he would have been the first racer to achieve the feat since Marco Pantani in 1998 - but he was finally buried in the Alps. "I knew I had lost the Tour definitively six kilometers from the summit of Galibier, on the day that Andy attacked on the Izoard," Contador says. "If I was unable to win the Tour this year, it was because of many adverse circumstances. I had very bad luck on the first day when I lost one minute and 14 in the blockage because of the crash. Then I couldn't avoid other falls; above all, the second I was involved in, when I damaged my right knee, which reduced my level of performance in the mountains. I also wasn't as fresh as at the Giro, which caught up with me during the Tour. The Giro is not the best preparation for the Tour."

That day on Izoard, when the younger Schleck brother attacked, Contador also suffered from the absence of his team. None of his comrades was able to keep up with the escape on Agnello, where support men like those who guided Andy through the valley toward Galibier would have been useful to the Spaniard. Neither Bjarne Riis, Saxo Bank's team manager, nor Contador were entirely happy with the team's components, which were thinned out by the Schleck brothers' move to Leopard Trek, taking with them the cream of Saxo Bank from the previous season: Fabian Cancellara, Jens Voigt, Jakob Fuglsang... When Riis received confirmation of sponsorship, most of the best riders were no longer on the market.

Neither did Contador arrive at the Tour in great shape, after a season overshadowed by a positive clenbuterol sample returned at last year's Tour and the International Cycling Union's case against him at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. It was announced on Tuesday that the hearing has been put back to November. Maintaining his Giro form against riders who had prepared solely for the Tour was also going to be problematic.

"The Giro-Tour double in cycling today is very difficult," Contador says. "You need luck in both, for the route of each to adapt to your characteristics and you need to have a superteam with you. In those conditions, anything is possible. Next year I will return to the Tour to win and I will focus exclusively on this race. The Tour is the most important race, and because of that, I will not go to the Giro."