Tour de France 2011: Winners and losers

As the champagne corks pop in Paris and 167 finishers breath a sigh of relief, it seems fitting to look at those who excelled themselves and those who need to go back to the drawing board following this year's Tour de France.

The winners

Rather predictably, all four jersey winners deserve a mention.

• Best overall rider, Cadel Evans: the yellow jersey provides a fitting finale to a near-perfect career - at the grand old age of 34 too. The two-time mountain bike world cup winner switched to road biking in 2002, picking up wins in secondary stage races and one-day classics before becoming world champion in Mendriso, Switzerland in 2009. With a win in the 2011 Tour on the tricky uphill finish on Stage 4, leading the 10km chase of Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck on Stage 18, and almost complete dominance in Stage 20's time trial, Evans is a deserved winner. He is now the oldest Tour de France winner since the Second World War and could quite easily call it a day. However, something tells me he'll be back to defend his jersey next year. 
• Best climber, Samuel Sanchez: once the General Classification was out of reach, the 2008 Olympic Champion switched his attention to the polka dot jersey. He used his strong climbing ability and superlative descending skills to great effect, picking up a win on Stage 12 at Luz Ardiden in the Pyrennes, much to the delight of the strong Spanish support. 
• Best young rider, Pierre Rolland: this young French climber on Team Europcar, for many days Thomas Voeckler's bodyguard, outsprinted Sanchez and Alberto Contador on Stage 19 to claim victory on Alpe-d'Huez and the white jersey for the best young rider. With his 11th place overall, 24 year old Rolland offers France the potential of a General Classification (GC) winner in a few years time. 
• Best sprinter, Mark Cavendish: a special mention goes out to the Manx Missile for matching 2010's five stage wins and, for the first time ever for a British rider, picking up the points jersey as the best sprinter. Cavendish fully acknowledges that he couldn't have achieved 20 Tour de France stage wins in his career without his highly organised HTC-Highroad team but it takes his daredevil attitude and nerves of steel to finish the job at the end of each stage. Cavendish is now joint 6th in the list of all-time stage winners of the Tour - another five wins next year would put him up to 3rd in that list. If he leaves HTC-Highroad at the end of this season that aim might just be pie in the Sky.

Now for some of the other riders who've excelled over the three weeks of this year's tour.

• First up, big Thor Hushovd. The 13-stone Norwegian powerhouse silenced his critics and proved why he's world champion with two stage wins and seven days in the yellow jersey. Thor's exploits did wonders for cycling's popularity in Norway as did his fellow countryman Edvald Boasson Hagen's, who also picked up two stage wins. Thor spearheaded an excellent Tour for Garmin-Cervelo too as the team claimed victory in the Team Time Trial, the best team overall and teammate Tyler Farrar also claimed a win on Stage 3.
• Thomas Voeckler may just have taken Richard Virenque's long-held crown as the darling of French housewives with his heroics in the yellow jersey. For 10 days France held its breath as Tommy summond up strength few knew he had, including I'm sure Voeckler himself. For his final three days in yellow France even dared to believe the unbelievable. But in the end the Alps broke brave Tommy's resistance, but not before he'd won over legions of fans for his courageous displays. If  Tommy can better his 4th place next year could France have their first GC winner since Bernad Hinault in 1987?

The losers

First off, let's get one thing straight. Being good enough to ride the Tour de France puts a cyclist into the very top echelons of those who race bicycles. The Tour is the pinnacle of many cyclists' careers and it's comparable to only the highest highs of other sports - the Champions League final if you will - so the riders that follow, apart from one, are by no losers in the everyday sense. No, these men simply fell short of the very high standards they set themselves.

• Bradley Wiggins: Our top British rider crashed on Stage 7 and called it quits with a broken collar bone. No-one can blame Wiggo for leaving the Tour, (although it's not always a tour-ending injury - see: George Hincapie, 2009 and Tyler Hamilton, 2003) but his departure deprived Team Sky and UK cycling fans of a GC contender and left Bradley unable to better his 4th place in 2009. Better luck next year.
• Alberto Contador: Bertie blew it. A crash in the early stages gave the two-time Tour winner a knee problem. Was this a convenient excuse for poor form or was Contador a serious contender hampered by an unfortunate crash? He certainly wasn't this year's favourite and the allegations that have dogged him can't have helped him stake his claim to the title. Valiant efforts on stages 16 and 19 came too late in the day for Contador and he finished 5th this year.
• Andy Schleck: I had a t-shirt when I was younger that read 'Second place, first loser'. It seems harsh on Andy, the young pretender to the throne, but with a strong team and so much natural ability it seemed like he was destined to better his two previous second places. His time trialling ability certainly let him down, losing over two minutes to Cadel Evans on the penultimate stage, but perhaps mentally, rather than physically, he wasn't able to make the difference when it mattered.
• Alexandr Kolobnev: A urine test on the Russian, riding for Team Katusha, revealed traces of  hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic which is often used in the treatment of hypertension and congestive heart failure, as well as removing excess fluid from the body and reducing urine output. Kolobnev withdrew from the Tour pending the results of a second urine test. This latest doping scandal adds another black mark to cycling's reputation, which has suffered heavily in recent years. Is Kolobnev simply one bad apple amongst 196 clean entrants in the Tour - let's hope so.