Prologue misery for Euskaltel

Euskaltel and Samu got off to an awful start in the Tour de France today. With his 75th place finish, a big 56 seconds down on Cancellara (who else?), Samu did not get the start to the race he was longing for. Losing 34 and 29 seconds to Lance and Alberto respectively over 8,9 kilometres is not good. Never mind Cancellara, the important thing here is the overall contenders. Samu also lost quite a few seconds to riders like Leipheimer, Klöden, Kreuziger, Rogers, Vino and Cadel, while on the bright side he finished just two seconds down on Sastre, one down on Basso and on the same time as Menchov and Wiggins. He even gained a few seconds on the Schleck brothers, so it's not all doom and gloom. Though, there's no hiding I was expecting something quite a bit better. So too did Igor González de Galdeano it seems. Obviously not happy with his charges' rides, the man nonetheless tried his best to hide his disappointment when speaking to the press afterwards. "The team did very well in the Dauphiné and I have confidence in my chosen riders", he said. "They're all very motivated and I'm sure we'll get to show our real value in the days to come. We've only just started". Samu himself was actually quite up-beat about his ride, saying: "I'm satisfied with my ride, I'm practically equal on time with Sastre, Menchov, Wiggins and Fränk Schleck, riders who will animate the race. We've just started and there are a lot of hard days coming up. Tomorrow's stage will be complicated, so we'll take it day by day." As for the other riders, Gorka was seven places and two seconds down on Samu, while JJ was 112th at 1:06. The rest of the guys really stacked the latter half of the result sheet. Iñaki was 165th at 1:21, Egoi 167th at the same time, Amets 173rd one second further back, Alan 179th at 1:24, Iván 189th at 1:33 and Rubén was a lowly 193rd at 1:39.