SUPER-BESSE, France — The attacks never came on the first mountain trek of the Tour de France, as defending champion Alberto Contador and his main rival Andy Schleck held fire and let others contest victory during the eighth stage of cycling’s biggest race.
There was much hype about the possibility of a first hilltop duel following a crash-marred week of nervous racing on flat roads. But with much harder climbs to follow in the Pyrenees and the Alps, three-time Tour champion Contador preferred to save energy on Saturday’s stage in the Massif Central, which Rui Alberto Costa held on to win after a solo breakaway.
When Costa surged ahead late on the 117-mile trek from Aigurande to Super-Besse, the likes of Alexandre Vino- kourov of Kazakhstan and Philippe Gilbert of Belgium tried — and failed — to chase down the Portuguese rider.
But with neither Gilbert nor Vinokourov a real threat for the overall title, Contador was not going to follow them for the sake of it. The Spaniard has bigger battles to win later on, harder mountains to climb.
The final climb to the Super-Besse ski resort was less than 1 mile long, and even if he had hunted down Gilbert and Vinokourov, Contador would not have been able to drop Schleck and Evans on such a minor climb — making chasing futile.
“It was not too testing a climb at the end, and it was too difficult to split the pack,” Contador said after Costa won his first Tour stage in a time of 4 hours, 36 minutes, 46 seconds ahead of Gilbert. Evans, the Australian, was third in the stage.
Norwegian rider Thor Hushovd, of the Boulder-based Garmin-Cervelo team, kept the overall lead heading into today’s ninth stage, just one second ahead of Evans, something Hushovd described as “a miracle” since he’s not a renowned climber and had expected to lose the jersey.
Schleck remains 12 seconds off the lead in sixth place. Contador is still 1:42 behind Hushovd in 20th.
