Tour de France 2011

 

Cadel Evans duly crossed the finish line in the yellow jersey on Sunday, the first Australian winner in the history of the Tour de France. But two days earlier and at the other end of the country there had been a moment when it looked as though the game might be up for the man who had twice lost the race by less than a minute and who had gained a reputation for attracting misfortune.

When Alberto Contador suddenly attacked, barely 20km into Friday's stage and soon after the riders had begun to climb the lower ramps of the Col du Télégraphe, Andy Schleck jumped away in instinctive pursuit of the defending champion. Behind them Evans wobbled, slowed to a halt and got off his bike. He looked at his back wheel in suspicion, shook it, and then remounted, getting a push from a fat man in a replica maillot jaune.
His BMC team‑mate Marcus Burghardt slowed in order to help him with the task of rejoining the small elite group now rapidly disappearing up the road, but a minute later Evans was off his bike again. What fresh catastrophe was this? The team car arrived and he was handed a new machine. When he restarted, it was as part of a larger group almost two minutes behind the leaders. It looked like a potentially decisive moment, the one in which Evans left Contador and the younger Schleck to fight it out for the yellow jersey, as they had in 2009 and 2010.
Twenty‑four hours earlier, Evans had distinguished himself as the only rider willing to respond to the attack made by Schleck on the crossing of the Col d'Izoard. Ascending the final climb of the day, on the Galibier, the Australian repeatedly gestured his frustration as the other leading contenders – Contador, Ivan Basso, Samuel Sánchez and Damiano Cunego – refused to join in. So with 10km to go, and Schleck more than four minutes ahead, he went for broke, grinding it out all the way to the line and halving the Luxembourg rider's lead, while also denying him the yellow jersey by a margin of 15 seconds.
That was the counterattack which won the Tour, but the following afternoon, as they approached the Alpe d'Huez, it looked as though the effort might have taken too much out of Evans's formidable reserves of energy. Somehow he recovered and was once again on the counterattack in the last couple of kilometres, finishing with Schleck and ensuring that Contador, up ahead in the leading group of three, could not make significant inroads. Another day later, in the time trial on Saturday, he burned up the hilly course around Grenoble to such effect that he finished only seven seconds behind Tony Martin, a specialist against the clock, with the nearest challenger – Contador – a whisker short of a minute away.
Evans, halfway though his 35th year, is the oldest Tour winner since the war, superseding Gino Bartali, the great Italian champion, whose two victories straddled the conflict and who was 34 years and one week old at the time of his second success in 1948.
The oldest of all is Firmin Lambot, a Belgian maker of equestrian saddles, who was 36 in 1922 when he secured his second victory without winning a stage. Evans's single stage win this year came on the first Tuesday, after a tough ride that ended on the Mur de Bretagne.
Evans was born and raised in the Northern Territory and spent his early years without television or radio, which explains his ignorance of the exploits of Phil Anderson, who became the first Australian to lead the Tour back in 1981. After moving to Geelong, near Melbourne, Evans was 14 when he watched a broadcast of Miguel Indurain winning one of his five Tours and was hooked.
He followed Anderson's pioneering path to Europe 10 years ago and his odyssey of misfortune and near-misses lasted until the autumn of 2009, when he demolished his reputation for being a wheelsucker – a rider who sits behind others, benefitting from their efforts without launching his own attacks – with a magnificently aggressive victory in the world championship road race in Mendrisio, Italy, close to his adopted home.