Evans looking to limit Alps damage
Australia's Cadel Evans is bracing himself for a crucial two days of racing in the French Alps after giving up the Tour de France yellow jersey.
On the first day of three in the Alps, the 31-year-old Aussie dug deep in a bid to stay as close as possible to CSC's Frank Schleck and to try to limit his losses to other rivals.
The end result left Luxembourg champion Schleck - who trailed Evans by just one second at the start of the stage - with the race lead for the first time in his career.
He now holds an eight-second lead on the Aussie, who dropped to third just one second behind surprising Austrian Bernhard Kohl of Gerolsteiner.
But what the 15th stage really did was to put the yellow jersey within reach of six challengers.
One of Evans's biggest crimes overnight was to allow Denis Menchov to jump back into contention.
'Pocket handkerchief'
The top six riders in the race's general classification are now in what the French call a 'pocket handkerchief'.
It means they are all stuck together, the sixth being CSC's Carlos Sastre who is only 49 seconds behind Schleck.
If Evans can limit the damage during the 16th and 17th stages, following tonight's rest day, he will take a psychological advantage over his rivals into the ultimate stage time trial over 53km - a potential yellow jersey decider.
The Aussie will be hoping he will not need that option, but given another collective show of strength from the CSC team - in which fellow Aussies Stuart O'Grady and team manager Scott Sunderland are playing their part - Evans should be anxious.
Evans was left on his own with three CSC riders to contend with on the final 11.1km climb.
Accelerations by Sastre, mixed up with some fierce tempo-setting by the Schleck brothers Andy and Frank, did not leave him with much choice.
Evans followed as best he could, but gave up time to Menchov, Sastre and Schleck.
Evans's Silence team manager Hendrik Redant said the race panned out much as he expected, playing down the fact that Evans lost Ukrainian team-mate Yaroslav Popovych early on the last climb.
"Losing 'Popo' like that was never planned. Our plan was for him to stay with Cadel a bit longer, that's for sure," he said.
"But the guys did a fair bit of work today. I think he (Popovych) is in better shape than he was in the Pyrenees.
"And we weren't the only ones who were isolated on the last climb, the only team that had several riders was CSC.
"We saw today that being isolated is not a disaster. Each one of the team did his job."
-AFP