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Updated: October 15, 2009, 1:02 AM ET

A little intrigue returns for 2010 Tour

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By Bonnie D. Ford
ESPN.com
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The day the route of the next Tour de France is unveiled offers a brief respite from cycling's pressure cooker of gossip, political infighting and doping issues. Riders and fans alike allow themselves to daydream about what the topography might reveal about the athletes during three weeks in July -- specifically, in this instance, defending champion Alberto Contador, young challenger Andy Schleck and Lance Armstrong, who will be pushing 39 when he tries to win his eighth Tour in the second year of his comeback.

In 2010, the race drops down from Holland via Belgium into northern France and follows an irregular clockwise path back to Paris. As is customary every other year, the Alps come first. The peloton will spend an extended stretch in the Pyrenees during the last week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first time riders assaulted the mountains that divide France from Spain.

After this year's experiment of placing an uphill finish the day before the Tour finale in Paris, the organizers came to their senses and restored the traditional last-Saturday individual time trial, which also happens to be the only long time trial in the race.

The 2010 route is as notable for what is absent as what is present. There will be no team time trial, which may be worse for some top riders with well-drilled squads, such as Armstrong and his new Radio Shack outfit, but better for the overall competitiveness of the race. Some of the air went out of the 2009 edition in the first week when several men thought to be contenders lost gobs of time because their teams were weak in the event, such as newly crowned world champion Cadel Evans (Silence-Lotto) and 2008 champion Carlos Sastre (Cervelo).

However, the early obstacle of the TTT has been replaced by something arguably just as tricky -- the ancient and uneven paving stones known in the sport as "cobbles," which are better suited to oxcarts than road bikes. Stage 3, which crosses the Belgian border, features seven stretches of the bumpy stuff, cycling's equivalent of a skier's moguls. The total distance on cobblestones is just more than eight miles of a 129-mile stage, but it's still the longest stretch of the surface Tour riders have faced in more than 25 years.

Cobbles tend to punish the same riders and teams as the TTT does -- the Spanish and Italian squads that are light on classics specialists used to navigating the minefield. Basque rider Iban Mayo's Tour hopes were dashed in 2004, the last time any cobblestone roads were part of the Tour, when he wiped out and lost four minutes on a much shorter cobbled stretch. In Armstrong's prime, he depended on perennial Paris-Roubaix contender George Hincapie to lead the charge and find the best line over cobbles. Garmin-Slipstream team director Jonathan Vaughters said surging sprinter Tyler Farrar, who lives in Belgium and is a seasoned cobbles rider, could use that stage to position himself for the yellow jersey in the early going.

Contador underscored the obvious by saying he hopes it doesn't rain and he doesn't crash. But it's not just the paving itself that poses a problem. As Armstrong pointed out in comments released by the Astana team -- perhaps the last time we'll see the seven-time Tour champion appear on that letterhead -- it's the anxious jostling for position in the lead-up to the cobbled stretches that undoes a lot of riders. "The kilometers before, the nerves, the anticipation before, that is the most dangerous part," he said.

The Alps probably will add up to the kind of cat-and-mouse game we saw in the Pyrenees this year, with a lot of climbing to no real effect in the standings. A rest day in Morzine could give cause to reflect on what happened the last time the Tour passed that way, in 2006, when Floyd Landis ended a breathtaking solo breakaway there to vault back into contention after having apparently lost the race the day before. Urine samples taken at the finish later led to Landis' conviction for use of synthetic testosterone and cost him his title.

Placing four Pyrenees stages in the last week tilts the race definitively toward the climbers. Perhaps the race's biggest novelty is that the peloton will visit one of the Tour's most hallowed summits -- the nearly 7,000-foot high Col du Tourmalet -- twice, once in the course of a stage and again for an uphill finish, only the second time a stage has ended there. That second trip up should sort out the podium.

The Pyrenean roads are more rugged, the crowds more intrusive, the police presence less evident than in the Alps. In the 2005 Tour, campers were so thick on the climb to Saint-Lary-Soulan the night before the stage, race staff couldn't properly place the barricades along the last part of the course. Minor skirmishing broke out between the crowd and the workers.

The events affected the race the next day, as Hincapie and Oscar Pereiro, matching pedal strokes in a breakaway on the summit finish, were forced to go single file through the roiling crowd. Hincapie took advantage and rode away to the stage win. Irritated Tour officials skipped the familiar Pyrenees climbs altogether the following year, sending riders to some little-known hills elsewhere on the Spanish border, but the Tour didn't feel quite right with the omission, and order has been restored since.

Given the difficulty of the final week, time-trial specialists probably won't be in peak form for the last long solo slog in the heart of Bordeaux's famous wine region. The distance won't do Contador any favors, either. An overall contender like Evans who has stayed in the hunt could make up considerable time that day.

Vaughters called the 2010 course "custom-made for Contador" but added that its design also should boost the chances of team leader Christian Vande Velde, whose injuries prevented him from making another podium run this year. "He's always better late in the race, and he's better in the Pyrenees than the Alps because he's better on steeper gradients," Vaughters said.

Once officials literally put the 2010 Tour on the map, it didn't take long for the swirling subplots to surface again. In the past week alone, French antidoping authorities renewed their attacks on the credibility of testing done by cycling's governing body, UCI, which responded by saying it might seek a new testing "partner." French prosecutors announced they have started an inquiry into medical waste left behind by Astana and other teams. Astana officials have denied they have anything to hide.

Meanwhile, Contador is still openly expressing hope he'll ride for a team other than Astana, whose financial woes appeared to have been temporarily solved by a recent infusion of sponsor cash. Thus far, the Kazakh owners of the team have insisted they will hold Contador to his 2010 contract. It has been a long time since a defending Tour champion was at least figuratively homeless, and it remains to be seen how Tour organizers will receive a team whose roster includes convicted doper Alexandre Vinokourov and whose Pro Tour license is still pending.

Another Spanish star, Tour of Spain winner Alejandro Valverde, could well be banned from racing next year for links to the gift-that-keeps-giving Operacion Puerto case. (His Caisse d'Epargne team is one of Contador's would-be wooers, along with Garmin.) And the cycling world lost a once-prominent performer with a troubled, doping-laced past when Belgium's Frank Vandenbroucke was found dead at age 34 in a hotel room in Senegal on Monday. Autopsy results are not yet known, but initial reports that said a pulmonary embolism was the cause of death have led many to believe Vandenbroucke, an admitted user of EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs, hastened his own demise.

Armstrong and Contador, the chief protagonists in the ongoing Tour drama, apparently coexisted peacefully in the same room during Wednesday's gala announcement. The erstwhile teammates were in street clothes, but next time they meet they'll be in different jerseys, with the same agenda as this year -- to run the other guy off the road. Global positioning systems are being set as we speak.

Bonnie D. Ford covers tennis and Olympic sports for ESPN.com. She can be reached at bonniedford@aol.com.