Carlos Sastre-- A big win for clean cycling.

CSC Saxo-Bank's Carlos Sastre has won the Tour de France. The spanish rider won the yellow jersey with the help of his powerful CSC squad with an attack at the base of L' Alpe De Huez, cycling's most fabled climb. Sastre won the stage solo--by more than two minutes-- taking the jersey from teammate Frank Schleck, and putting 1:34 into rival Cadel Evans (Silence-Lotto) coming into the final time trial. Evans, a superior time trialist, was expected to make up the time and win the race, but Sastre rode away only allowing Evans to cut about 30 seconds out of his time.

Sastre's victory is big for cycling. First, it was clearly a team victory. Sastre's individual effort on L' Alpe and on the stage 20 time trial were incredible, but his very strong team set him up. CSC whittled down GC contenders essentially by taking advantage of the overwhelming team strength, and by creating a plan to put one of the Schleck brothers in yellow to take pressure off Sastre until he could attack late in the race. CSC was by far the strongest team, and each rider gave up individual aspirations of stage wins to fight for Sastre to wear yellow in paris. Essentially, the CSC strategy worked like this in the mountain stages: each alp stage, with the exception of stage 17 had two off category climbs. The team would work together to get everyone over the first climb, including power houses Jens Voight and Fabian Cancellara who are not climbers. After the first decent, CSC would try to blow up the peleton by placing Cancellara-- the world time trial champion and arguably the strongest rider in the world-- on the front to set a blistering pace. This isolated Evans and the rest of the GC contenders, making it hard for them to hang on and hard for them to endure multiple stages. When things went uphill, Jens Voight would take a pull followed by other riders including Andy Schleck-- winner of this year's best young riders' jersey-- and then Frank Schleck or Sastre would attack. It was a masterful team effort. No other team was able to work like this. The consequence was that Cancellara, Voight, and both of the Schlecks failed to win stages, something they all regularly do. But the team won the team classification, and Sastre won the tour. Go teamwork.

Finally Sastre's victory was a victory for cycling. He rides for a "clean team," one of a handful of teams that have strong independent doping controls. After the tour, he said, "i believe in clean cycling because i am clean." It's nice to have a champion who you can have confidence in. Sastre's A sample won't come back positive. That's a victory for the sport.

Stay tuned for info about the Legal Spin Century on August 23 at 7:00 A.M.