PARIS — The champagne flowed at the Team Garmin-Sharp bus Sunday. On a postcard-perfect afternoon, CEO Jonathan Vaughters raised his glass to a team just for making it to Paris in one piece.
After the first week of this 99th Tour de France, this team didn’t need a director as much as a cut man.
The Boulder-based team limped home with only six of nine riders, its chances for glory all but wiped out in a monumental crash in Stage 6 on July 6. Among those sent home were Giro d’Italia winner Ryder Hesjedal and Boulder resident Tom Danielson, who was ninth here last year.
David Millar created some thunder with a win in Stage 12, but sprinting specialist Tyler Farrar never healed enough to threaten the rest of the way.
Garmin-Sharp finished 20th out of 22 teams. Irishman Daniel Martin was its highest finisher in 35th. After the Alps and Pyrenees, Colorado’s Rockies never looked better to these guys.
“You can’t always have good luck in cycling,” Vaughters said. “We had a really good roll there with the Giro. The first week of the race was crap for us, but as I’ve always said about this group of guys, you don’t really find out what it is when things are going well. You find out what it is when things are going (badly).
“These guys hit rock bottom. Half the team was out of the race, and they pulled it together, figured out new objectives and wound up winning a stage and almost won another one. Dan Martin was doing well at the end of the mountain stages, so at the end of the day, that speaks very much to the character of the team.”
A grueling Tour
Sunday’s mostly ceremonial procession had a fitting end. , led teammate Mark Cavendish into the final sprint to take the popular Paris stage, watched by more than a million fans who flooded the sun-splashed streets leading toward the Champs-Elysées.
For the last two weeks, Garmin-Sharp wasn’t much more than fine print, sans Millar’s one-day headlines. Then again, neither were many teams. One report said 75 percent of the cyclists who reached Paris had crashed at least once this month. Only Wiggins’ Sky Procycling team and , avoided major injuries.
“Hard,” veteran Christian Vande Velde, who almost won Stage 15, said of the Tour. “Hard more emotionally than physically — physically because we’re all damaged and bruised but emotionally in the sense that we’ve always done so well with so little. Now we had a really great team this year, and we came away with less than we ever have.”
Toughing it out
In reality, Garmin-Sharp could have finished with five riders. Farrar suffered a back injury and major road rash from four crashes.
“Until he has a week to totally recover, you can never totally repair those muscles, because each day you’re sort of reinjuring yourself,” Vaughters said.
Vaughters said Farrar nearly abandoned.
“A couple days, he came this far,” Vaughters said. “One day (Stage 7), I was amazed he made it through. He’s getting better. He’ll have a great month of August. Once he recovers, he’ll do well.”
If there’s a positive, the only pressure on Garmin-Sharp after the first-week disaster was if the team would ever see the Eiffel Tower. This may be the best team Vaughters ever had and if pain loves company, this team became Le Tour’s M*A*S*H unit.
“We had more laughs this Tour than any other Tour,” said Vande Velde, who finished 60th. “If you’re not laughing, you’re crying. We had some good times.”
Once Garmin-Sharp recovers, it will try to , which begins Aug. 20 in Durango.
Meanwhile, Wiggins returns to London a national hero who could approach knighthood with a win in the Olympic road race Saturday.
“It’s hard to take in as it happens,” Wiggins said. “Every lap of the Champs-Elysées was goose pimple stuff. We had a job to do with Mark, and we were all motivated to do that, so it made it go a lot quicker. The concentration was high, and for Mark to finish it off like that … well, it couldn’t get any better.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnhendersondp
Tour de France at a glance
Sunday’s Stage 20: The final stage took the peloton from Rambouillet to Paris on a largely ceremonial 74-mile trek. Attacks started only when the peloton hit Paris. Mark Cavendish racked up his fourth consecutive win on the Champs-Elysées.
Yellow jersey: Bradley Wiggins kept his overall lead over teammate Christopher Froome at 3:21 to become the first British champion in the Tour’s history.
Team Garmin-Sharp:
Garmin’s top sprinter, Tyler Farrar, rode to an 11th-place finish in the mass sprint on the Champs-Elysées. The Associated Press
