Last week's Dauphiné Libéré, which ended Sunday, is considered a warm-up for the Tour de France.
But the winner of that French bicycling race, Christophe Moreau, isn't the cyclist being touted as a top contender for the Tour, which runs July 7-29.
It's Alexander Vinokourov, above, the captain of the Kazakhstan-based Astana team. In spite of his 20th-place finish overall, Vinokourov won two stages (a time trial and the mountainous final stage), and wore the leader's jersey for one stage.
Radar
And his team showed its strength as well, winning a total four out of eight stages, and leading the race for three days.
The 33-year-old Kazakh cyclist has been on many cycling fan's radar screens since he finished in third place in the 2003 Tour de France. He missed the Tours in 2004 with a broken shoulder and 2006 because nearly half his team (but not Vino) had been implicated in the Operacion Puerto doping scandal.
So that leaves 2005 as the last time we've seen Vinokourov racing in the Tour, as a member of the T-Mobile squad. Vino was involved in one memorable scene after another. Consider that stage in the Pyrenees when Vinokourov attacked and was pulled by teammates (and team favorites) Andreas Kloden and Jan Ullrich.
Vinokourov's parting shot to the peloton came in the final stage, when he attacked with the sprinters in Paris. Not only did the general classification-style cyclist beat the sprinters in the final day of the Tour, but he put time bonuses over Levi Leipheimer which put him into fifth place.
Team
Vinokourov appeared to spend a lot of time “team-building” in this year's Dauphiné. Consider the team captain riding in support of two-stage overall leader Andrey Kashechkin and letting teammate Antonio Colom cross the finish line ahead of him in Stage 5.
It will be interesting to see if his efforts pay off.
Levi
Others to watch are of course are Discovery Channel's Levi Leipheimer, who won the Dauphiné last year but suffered from stomach illness during much of this year's race.
Leipheimer's attempt at a stage win on Sunday had lots of drama, especially when Vinokourov came out of the pack to challenge him. Too bad Leipheimer crashed on the slick pavement on the round-about.
Zabriskie
For me, one of the surprises of the Dauphiné was American David Zabriskie of Team CSC. The US time-trial champion could be expected to do well in the prologue and time-trial and he did, finishing sixth and third.
But the interesting thing is that he hung in the top 10 throughout the race, finishing in fifth place in the General Classification. In fact, Zabriskie was right there with the leading group of finishers on most stages, including the last one. Who knows, maybe Zabriskie could wear the yellow again come July.
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