The Tour de France starts today

Everything is ready for the opening of the most attended event of world cycling, the Tour de France.

This year, however, is marred by the absence of last year's big winner, Alberto Contador, that neither he nor his team will take the start due to bad path Astana in recent times.

20 teams of 9 riders each will start a tour that for a whopping 23 years does not win any French. The last, the great Hinault. The bookmarks in this issue, we know them by heart: Alejandro Valverde, Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre, Damiano Cunego, Oscar Pereiro, Denis Menchov ... In short, those who manage the world cycling roost since Operation Puerto. Except for Contador.

They will be full of emotion twenty-one stages (each emotion for sprinters, climbers and others for some of those breaks in the absence of a mile and a slump neutralized for runners.) Mountain stages, the crème de la crème of the Tour, will run the 13 and 14 July to 20, 22 and 23. This last and final time trial will determine the winner. Then walk triumphantly through the streets of Paris.

According to bookmakers, particularly Bwin.com, Cadel Evans wins the Tour and Alejandro Valverde will be second. There are very suspicious of this statistic seen what happened in the Euro.

Image: Flickr.com