It may not get quite the attention, but to my mind his ride two days earlier, on the stage won by Andy Schleck to the summit of the Col du Galibier, was at least its equal.

Andy Schleck, the stick-thin, tall dirty blonde from Luxembourg, has two great strengths as a Tour rider – his climbing abilities and the support of the strongest team in the race, including his brother Frank; Leopard-Trek were the only team with two riders realistically capable of winning the Tour. He used both of these – and a couple of other factors – to their absolute maximum on stage 18.

Long breakaways by overall contenders are the stuff of Tour legend, for good reason. They are exceedingly hard to pull off in modern cycling, where the broader talent pools and better-organized team tactics all work against the lone rider. Even on the slopes of a Hors Categorie climb, professional cyclists ride fast enough that drafting plays a significant role. For the Galibier, and the Col du Lautaret that effectively forms the lower part of the climb, this is particularly the case; with kilometer upon kilometer of “false flat”, followed by a relatively gradual rise before the steeper summit of the Galibier itself.

On this day, those kilometers of false flat were to be made even harder by a howling head wind; the Lautaret is a straight, unsheltered drag. By rights, even the strongest lone rider should be battered back to the peloton by the unrelenting wind, while their cagier competitors share the load behind.

Andy Schleck and his team had other ideas – a huge gamble, but one not without its logic. He attacked from a group containing the leaders near the top of the day’s first climb, the Col d’Izoard. Cadel, as he later made clear, could have responded, as could a number of the other GC contenders, but they chose not to. They judged that a) Andy’s attack was not likely to succeed given the conditions, and b) that its main purpose was to force Evans and any other GC rivals to work hard chasing, leaving a rested Frank Schleck free to attack later on. It seemed a reasonable calculation.

But Andy Schleck had a not-so-secret weapon waiting up the road for him, in the shape of Maxime Monfort. In recent years, placing teammates in early breakaways on mountain stages has become increasingly common. “domestiques” will often be dropped by team leaders on early climbs if the pace is on – and thus are of no more use. However, if one or two follows the inevitable early breakaway, they can usually hang on and are conveniently placed to assist their team leader when they catch up later in the stage. Both BMC and Leopard-Trek used this tactic. Leopard-Trek’s Monfort, however, was a much stronger rider than BMC’s Brent Bookwalter. In the stage 20 Time Trial, Monfort would finish 14th, far ahead of Bookwater’s 85th placing.

So, when Andy reached the bottom of the Izozard and began the long drag to the Galibier, he spent little time fighting the wind. Instead, he had one of the strongest domestiques in the race to do it for him. By contrast, when the other overall contenders – Sanchez, Basso, Contador, Voeckler, and Evans – reached the bottom of the valley, while their helpers were more numerous, they were weaker riders. A tired Bookwalter and Chris Anker Sorenson (teammate of Alberto Contador) battled away, and then several of Sanchez’ Euskatel-Euskadi teammates. But they continued to lose time on Monfort and Schleck.

And then something else very odd happened.

Along the false flat to the Galibier, the Monfort-Schleck train gradually caught the rest of the early breakaway, including a rider from the Quick Step team, Dries Devenyns. Devenyns’ solitary professional win is a stage of the Tour of Austria in 2009. Fine rider compared to us mere mortals that he undoubtedly is, his remote chance of a stage win was over as soon as Andy Schleck passed him; either Schleck would ride to the win, or the peloton would catch them both. Neither he nor his team had anything much to gain either way. His every instinct as a cyclist would have been to try to latch on to Andy’s wheel; to get a relatively easy ride on the lower slopes of the Lautauret for as long as he possibly could. But, inexplicably, he began to work with Schleck and Monfort, taking turns battling the evil wind, and further extending Andy Schleck’s advantage over Cadel and his other rivals.

The “politics of the peloton” are complex, and would seem very odd to many Australians raised in the zero-sum games that are Aussie Rules football, league, union, and cricket. “The chop”, and variations thereof, have a very long tradition in road cycling.

Other factors were hindering the chase. Thomas Voeckler was the revelation of the Tour, going from plucky opportunist to serious contender, to the disbelief of many. On this day, it seems, the disbelievers included Voeckler himself. Fearing that he would need his teammate’s help to be paced up the climb after being dropped, he refused to let Pierre Roland (later to win on the Alpe D’Huez) assist in the chase, much to the annoyance of Evans.

With 17 kilometres to go, Monfort was done. Andy Schleck held a lead of over four minutes. Cadel tried to attack to chase alone, but was unable to get away in the vicious wind. Undeterred, he resumed the chase, dragging the rest of the peloton behind him, only briefly helped by Alberto Contador.

Andy Schleck dropped the remaining breakaway riders and climbed as only the very best can up the Galibier. Schleck rarely looks in any discomfort on a climb; while internally he must suffer as much as any rider, his face remains fixed in a half-smile.

Meanwhile, Cadel slogged away, looking far less fluent, bike swinging from side to side, his cadence slower, his face contorted. It looked ugly, as if he could falter at any stage. But he maintained his pace, and, slowly, slowly, the time gap to Schleck dropped as the two men battled the wind, climb, and altitude. Behind Evans, riders gradually tailed off. Not by an attack. Not by the wind, which Evans was largely battling for them. But by his relentless pace. Eventually, even Contador and Sanchez couldn’t hang on. Only a select few – Frank Schleck, Ivan Basso, the plucky Voeckler and the young rider of the Tour, Pierre Roland, were still there.

With one kilometer to go, Andy Schleck had a 2:38 lead on the Evans-led pack. But his style changed. He’d cracked. The superb images from France TV show him in visible pain and struggling to keep the pedals turning. He ground on, as best he could. Nothing could stop him winning the stage. He’d done what no GC rider had done for years; won a mountain stage, solo, after a long breakaway. But he’d taken an eternity to climb that last kilometre.

Frank Schleck sprinted past Cadel in the last few metres of the stage, to take second, 2 minutes and 7 seconds behind his brother. But the time gap to Andy was what really mattered. He took another 23 seconds out of Andy’s advantage in that last kilometre, leaving him 2 minutes and 15 second behind on the stage, and 57 seconds back in the overall standings.

Cadel climbed the Lautaret/Galibier sequence, unassisted, almost two minutes faster than Andy Schleck. He won the Tour by 1 minute and 34 seconds.

Still, there are a few things you see in person on an Alpine climb that you miss on the TV. Il Diablo, perhaps the Tour’s most famous spectator for his appearances in a devil costume, is sponsored by a biodiesel company. There’s the loot from the sponsors’ caravan; I missed out on a Caisse De Stepargne jersey, but snaffled a Carrefour polka-dot cap, a bottle opener, and a bag. The thousands of amateur cyclists of varying abilities who ride up in the morning to get a viewing spot provide a great reality check; the pros look similarly pained on the steeper parts; the difference is that they’re going at least twice as fast. And you get to see the bits of road graffiti that the TV crew edits out – my favourite was “Trek bikes for sale – call Lance” (context here). But best of all, you get to chat to a huge variety of fellow fans, from the Dutch guys in motorhomes to the hundreds of Aussies on organized tours.

As for the race itself, it’s shaping up as an interesting contest. While we still don’t know who’s going to win the Tour, the first real mountains have eliminated a few pre-race favourites. Lance Armstrong’s pissed-off expression as he passed me, minutes behind the race leaders, said it all. Bradley Wiggins’ race is also likely run (to the surprise of noone but a few over-enthusiastic British fans). But, beyond that, the last kilometres of the day’s stage have called into question the pre-race assumption that it was Alberto Contador’s tour to lose.

For the past two years, Contador has been the world’s best Grand Tour rider by a considerable margin. Grand Tours are decided in two types of stages – mountainous ones, and individual time trials. Like Armstrong at his peak, he was both the best climber in the field, and amongst the very best time trialists. But, in the last kilometer of yesterday’s Alpine stage, Andy Schleck scampered away with Samuel Sanchez (a chance for the podium, but not amongst the top favourites) to win the stage from a group containing virtually every other GC (overall) contender. The time gain was a fairly inconsequential ten seconds. But will he be able to do so again – and gain enough time on Contador and the other GC contenders? He’ll need it.

And what of the other contenders? Not least, what of the current yellow jersey holder, Australia’s own Cadel Evans? He’s made it through the lucky dip of the first week with a few bonus seconds, and stayed with the other contenders on the first mountain top finish. Will he have the climbing legs to stick with Schleck, Contador and the others on the Col de Madelaine tonight (Aussie time)? And, even if he does, will the accumulated fatigue from the Giro d’Italia (which most of Evans’ rivals did not race) catch up with him, perhaps on my favourite Tour climb, the Col du Tourmalet, next weekend?

We’ll just have to wait. Like a Test series, watching the Tour requires patience. But if you stay up for it, there’ll be ample gorgeous helicopter shots of the French countryside to fill the time.

In the AFL, it’s the home-and-away matchup of the year. While there have been longer winning streaks in the league’s history, never before have two undefeated teams met in the fourteenth round of competition. Geelong is the benchmark team of the competition, winning a premiership in 2007, narrowly missing out in 2008, and hasn’t lost a game this year. St. Kilda’s season has been remarkable not only for its undefeated streak but the margins of its victories; its percentage of 177.5% is the kind of thing you expect to see in the Manangatang District League third-division competition, not the elite competition with its player draft and salary cap as balancing mechanisms.

The Championships will come to their climax at the renovated Wimbledon. While Lleyton Hewitt’s run has ended in the quarter-finals, the prospect of two more displays from the most elegant player of the modern era, Roger Federer, should be worth waiting up for.

But, unsurprisingly, my eyes will be on Monaco for the start of the three-week carnival of cycling that is the Tour de France. If the drama and intrigue during the race gets anywhere close to the pre-race fun and games we’ve had, it should be a cracker.

If you want a list of the favourites, you could try here – the short version is that Alberto Contador is the warm-to-hot favourite, Australia’s Cadel Evans is arguably next in line, and there’s an unusually large bunch of other riders with a realistic chance, including 2008 champion Carlos Sastre, to the Schleck Brothers, to the omnipresent Lance Armstrong. Throw in Giro winner Denis Menchov and Levi Leipheimer and it’s a pretty volatile mix. Cadel has had a last-minute piece of bad news, with a teammate suspended for taking EPO, and again he’ll probably be left without teammates on the hardest climbs of the Tour. But with Contador the marked man of this year’s tour, and with the Astana trio of Armstrong, Contador, and Leipheimer slugging it out against Saxo Bank’s Andy and Frank Schleck, (and possibly providing opportunities for Evans to let them do some of the work for him), he may just get away without needing them. Not to mention, of course, the question that’s been puzzling everyone since Armstrong announced his comeback – is there room for two egos the size of Armstrong’s and Contador’s in the one team?

Key stages to watch include the time trials – dull television, but often decisive. Of the mountain stages, the decisive ones have been deliberately placed at the back of the race this year, with the early stages through the Pyrenees designed to keep the main players together. Only Stage 7′s climb to the ski station at Andorra Arcalis stands much chance of breaking up the main contenders, not because it’s a particularly tough climb in itself, but it comes at the end of 224 kilometres of hilly terrain. While the Tourmalet climb on stage 9 will always be a brute, 70 kilometres of downhill roll to the stage finish will almost certainly bring the major contenders back together again. Several of the Alps stages, by contrast, are good chances for changes in the “general classification”, particularly stage 17, which has two short but very nasty climbs near the finish.

But, if it’s a close race this year, it will be decided at the end of Stage 19 on the slopes of the Mont Ventoux; geologically part of the Alps, it sits well apart from any other mountains of similar size. Its upper part is completely denuded of vegetation, leaving the riders to be buffeted by the mistral, adding an extra degree of difficulty to what is already an extremely long and steep climb.

Long and steep enough that the winner must inevitably be using drugs to get ahead of the pack? Hard to know. There are, undoubtedly, those who use drugs to gain a deliberate advantage in the professional peloton. There have been since the sport of professional cycling began, and the suspension of Thomas Dekker makes obvious that they’re still around. But, just maybe, the UCI’s new “biological passport” program may be making inroads on two fronts – reducing the numbers cheating, and reducing the scope for gaining advantage of those that do. There have been fewer fairytale rides like Floyd Landis’s effort in the 2006 Tour in the past couple of years. And the times on some of the major Tour climbs have actually been going back up a little over the past few years. So while it would be naive to think that drugs are going to play no part in deciding the results of the Tour this year, it’s reasonable to hope that they might have a bit less influence than the recent past.

As well as SBS’s excellent Cycling Central website (whose contributors include LP’s own Philip Gomes), you can get a first-person account of the race from the Twitter feeds of many cyclists, including Cadel Evans, Michael Rogers, and Lance Armstrong, though sadly not Simon Gerrans, who was inexplicably left off his team’s squad for the race.

Oh, and one last thing – the flat stages of the Tour are more than likely going to be the Mark Cavendish show. Cavendish is a delightfully profane character from the Isle of Man who is probably the worst climber and time triallist in the Tour field. But after getting an aerodynamic tow to near the line by Australian “lead-out rider” Mark Renshaw, Cavendish is currently the fastest cyclist alive over the last 200 metres of a stage. But watch for Thor Hushovd, Allan Davis, and Oscar Freire trying to disprove that!