ITV Sport's Matt Rendell assesses the main general classification contenders for the 2011 Tour de France.

An imaginative overture to this year’s Tour de France, with four uphill but not mountain-top finishes providing a showcase for the most exciting rider now active: the extraordinary Philippe Gilbert (Belgium, Omega Pharma-Lotto).

A mouth-watering prospect to enjoy while it lasts because the winner of this year’s Strade Bianche, Flèche Brabançonne, Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Tour of Belgium and Ster ZLM Toer, is no Tour de France contender. He would one day like to attempt a good GC result in a three-week tour but, to do so, he’ll have to compromise his power by losing serious amounts of weight, and I can’t see it happening until he has completed his classic collection by winning Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, if not the Tour of Flanders.

Setting aside Gilbert, a new generation of contenders is emerging to challenge the old timers, even if the old timers, truth be told, are only 26 (Andy Schleck) and 28 (Alberto Contador).

Robert Gesink

First among them is Dutchman Robert Gesink (Rabobank). 25 years old, he was sixth last year, after a Tour de Suisse in which he rode easily away from Andy and Fränk Schleck to take the race lead. He lost it in the final time trial, plummeting from first to fifth overall, and learned a lesson: ‘Must learn to ride against the clock.’ He has: early this year, he was 1st in the 18.5km time trial at the Tour of Oman, ahead of the likes of Pinotti, Fabian Cancellara and Boasson Hagen; he was 9th over 9.3km at Tirreno-Adriatico on 15 March (won by Cancellara); and he was 7th over 24km at the Tour of the Basque Country on 9 April (Tony Martin), and he achieved all that without forgetting how to climb. To pick a recent result, he was 2nd on the uphill finish at Le Collet d’Allevard in Stage 6 of the Critérium du Dauphiné on 11 June, 8 secs ahead of another Tour de France contender, Jurgen Van Den Broeck, albeit 31 full seconds behind the solo winner, Joaquin Rodríguez (Spain, Katyusha).

Gesink has talent, and a team to back him up: Maarten Tjallingii (third in Paris-Roubaix); Laurens Ten Dam (third on Mount Baldy at the Tour of California on 21 May and, more recently, eighth overall in Tour de Suisse); the brilliant 24-year-old climber and Tour debutant Bauke Mollema (10th overall in Tour of Catalunya, 2nd overall in Vuelta a Castilla y Leon, and 5th overall in the Tour de Suisse), and Luis León Sánchez (twice a stage winner at the Tour), to name but a few. At the Criterium du Dauphiné (5-12 June, won by Sky’s Bradley Wiggins), Gesink tested himself on a couple of the mountain stages, and after the race began yet another block of heavy training. Expect him to emerge among the top four in the final week of the Tour.

Jurgen Van Den Broeck

The slow-burning Jurgen Van Den Broeck (Bel, Omega Pharma-Lotto), at 28 years old, is emerging as Belgium’s first realistic Grand Tour challenger since – well, hard to recall, but perhaps his ill-starred near-namesake, Frank Vandenbroucke. Fifth in last year’s Tour without ever really showing himself, Van Den Broeck showed early form this season in finishing second overall in the Ruta del Sol (20-24 February), 1 sec behind the winner, Markel Irizar (Spain, RadioShack), and stamped his authority on June’s Criterium du Dauphiné by winning Stage 1 at Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. But he tends to over-elaborate – four or five attacks too early on, instead of one decisive effort at the right moment – and he’s definitely a climber, not a tester, so he’ll have to gain in the mountains what he’s going to lose in the final 42.5km time trial around Grenoble.

Samuel Sánchez

Ditto the Olympic road-race champion, Samuel Sánchez: fourth a year ago behind Denis Menchov, whose Geox team was not selected for the Tour, Sánchez is realistic about his chances of repeating or improving on last year’s result: it’ll be very, very hard indeed. Horrible for him to lose his podium place in the final time trial. The curse of fourth place: first loser, they call it. And falling short of the final podium is so often as good as it gets in an entire career.

Bradley Wiggins

Which raises the question: can Sammy’s predecessor as first loser, Bradley Wiggins, come good this year? Third in Paris-Nice in the second week of March, he plays down his victory in June’s Dauphiné: he was always going to ride hard there, win or lose, and the Tour is the bigger goal. All the same, he was brilliant against the clock and looked comfortable on the climbs. No, he didn’t win a stage: he’ll never be a Contador in the mountains and there’s no point expecting him to ride like one. Wiggins describes himself as a natural 82kg bloke who slims down to 70kg for the Tour and has to ride accordingly.

But he was the moral winner of the time trial, a rehearsal for the penultimate day of the Tour, to be ridden over the same distance on the same course; Tony Martin won in the dry, Brad came in 11 seconds down, in the wet.

Team Sky

Sky are finally looking like the Team they say they are, although their success will depend greatly on keeping the brilliant Boasson Hagen fit and healthy. Rigoberto Urán, too, has been under par with hay fever but he came good – and how! – on the final stage of the Dauphiné. And Wiggins is looking fleshless but not wasted, light but still strong, and feeling wiser after last year’s debacle. Can he repeat his fourth place? I think so. Can even fight for the podium? Only if Contador suffers a collapse after his Giro exertions, or something else goes wrong (think: 2009 Paris-Nice, or even this year’s Castilla y León, when it wasn’t a collapse but a mechanical problem that took him out of contention). If so, for me, it’s Gesink second, Wiggins third.

The four US-registered teams at the Tour bear witness to the strength of Anglo-Saxon cycling. But they display the full gamut of weaknesses. BMC have a genuine, if aging contender in 34-year-old Cadel Evans, but he lacks team support, as ever, and tends to have one bad day. HTC-Highroad have strength in depth, and will clean up in the sprints with Cav, but that formidable lead-out train inevitably leaves Tony Martin short-staffed in the mountains. By way of compensation, Martin is catching up with Cancellara in the time-trials. I say the final time trial goes to him, perhaps followed by Scotland’s David Millar.

Of Millar’s team, Garmin-Cervelo, and of the fourth US team, part-owned by Lance Armstrong and sponsored – but for how long? By RadioShack, the same criticism can be made: in the words Armstrong spat at T-Mobile’s team-of-all-the-talents a few years ago, ‘Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.’ The Shack’s many chiefs are almost pensionable: Haimar Zubeldia turned 34 in April; Andy Kloeden is 36; Levi Leipheimer is 38 this year; and Chris Horner, the winner of May’s Tour of California, will soon turn 40.

Their directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel has lived in virtual symbiosis with Lance Armstrong for the past decade and a half - the chemistry between them has been under federal investigation for a year or more - so victory for another of the Bruyneel gang’s middle-aged members probably isn’t what the sport needs right now. In any case, to paraphrase Bjarne Riis, talking (rightly, it turned out) of Armstrong himself a couple of years ago, it makes no sense to think an old man will be able to stay with the young ’uns in the mountains.

Ryder Hesjedal

It was for Garmin, of course, that Bradley Wiggins took fourth place in the 2009 Tour de France. Their manager Jonathan Vaughters has a habit of producing a dark horse. In 2008 the unfancied Christian Van Der Velde occupied the same slot, and last year, the dead-pan Canadian Ryder Hesjedal (if you’re wondering about the name, his great-grandparents were Norwegian migrants) finished seventh overall, with a brilliant breakaway over the cobbles and then a fantastic fourth place on the stage finishing in fog and rain on the Tourmalet, after which he cursed Joaquín Rodríguez, who sat behind him all the way up, then nipped past 300m from the line to steal 3rd place behind Andy Schleck and Contador.

Hesjedal can do the same again, perhaps even better, although there’s a problem: Garmin-Cervelo boss Jonathan Vaughters is talking up Hesjedal’s team-mate Tom Danielson, a Tour debutant at 33, although he has finished sixth and seventh overall in previous Tours of Spain. I don’t see it.

Who else? Astana’s Vinokourov and Kreuziger? It’s too late for Vino and too soon for Roman. Ivan Basso? He’s 33 and has the experience, but see Riis on age and youth. Joaquín Rodríguez? Not riding: Team Katyusha is fielding an all-Russian team at the Tour so they’re leaving out the one team member who could actually make an impact on GC because he holds the wrong passport. Their leader will be Vladimir Karpets; remember him? Best Young Rider sometime in the late seventeenth century? Nor me.

Nicholas Roche

An honourable mention for Nicholas Roche, leading AG2R-La Mondiale and at peace now, or so it seems, with his talented French team-mates John Gadret (John, not Jean: his parents were Johnny Halliday fans), fourth in the recent Giro d’Italia, and Hubert Dupont, twelfth in the same. With the hardest stage race for years in their legs, I don’t know how much help – or how much hindrance – they’ll be in a position to provide their Irish team leader in July.

Alberto Contador

Like Gadret, reigning Tour champion Alberto Contador, of course, is another Giro survivor, except of course he did much more than survive: he took control of the race on Mt Etna in Stage 9, vanquished all-comers in the mountain time trial on Stage 16, and between times handed out stage wins to his friends, which drove Eddy Merckx to distraction: ‘When you can win, you must win.’ But Contador refused to contest the finishes on the Grossglockner (Stage 13: second to José Rujano), or on Monte Zoncolan (Stage 14: second to Igor Antón), or at Gardeccia-Val di Fassa  (Stage 15: third behind Mikel Nieve), or indeed at Macugnaga in Stage 19, when he ushered in his former team-mate Paolo Tiralongo.

Contador, then, is looking at a potential Giro-Tour double. Yet a similarly gruelling Giro in 2010 ruined the chances of Wiggins, Evans, Vinokourov and everyone other Tour contender who made the mistake of completing. Contador and more than half the Saxo Bank Sungard team who will support him at the Tour rode the Giro. It is, as the expression goes, a big ask, of them if not of Contador, on whose shoulders also hangs a doping enquiry that, scandalously, will not be resolved until late August. Many a mountain to climb for the Spaniard.

Andy Schleck

And if he is to win the Tour, Alberto will have to overcome an Andy Schleck still angry after what he still thinks of as unsportsmanlike behaviour on the Port de Balès last year, when Contador attacked moments after Andy had shipped his chain. The one thing missing in the Schleck’s armoury is – was? – a streak of ruthlessness. Might Contador have instilled it in his biggest rival? You have to hope so, for the sake of the race.

Doubts have been raised over Andy Schleck’s preparation: only eighth in the Amgen Tour of California from 15 to 22 May, as Contador was sailing to victory in the Giro; only nineteenth in the Tour de Suisse from 11 to 19 June. Is he struggling to find his form? Well, no he isn’t. Last year, he was formidable in the Tour (he lost to Alberto Contador, yes, but the margin was tiny, and no one else even got close), after very similar preparation: 24th in California, 14th in Tour de Suisse. All looks to be going according to a meticulously laid plan. Don’t forget, the Tour will be won and lost on the Galibier, on Alpe d’Huez and in Grenoble, on 21, 22 and 23 July. No good starting at your best and fading.

Watching Andy Schleck’s impressive time trial at the end of last year’s Tour, I felt he would be ready to challenge Contador this year, even if the two men started equally fresh. Contador was already a complete rider; Schleck still had a margin for improvement against the clock. Last winter, Schleck worked hard on his time trialling, tweaking his position in the wind tunnel, re-jigging his frame angles, putting in the ground work. Can he beat Contador against the clock? No. Can he reduce his losses? Yes, he can. And he and his team-mates will have the best piece of equipment of all at the Tour: fresh legs. My prediction?

This will be held against me, I know, but here it is: Andy Schleck to win, Contador to suffer a loss of form of Cadel Evans proportions at some stage in the Tour, and Gesink, Wiggins and Sánchez to hoover up the pieces between them.

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