Cycling: Rolling the dice on an attempt to win stages in the last week of the Tour de France

Peter Sagan with the green jersey during the stage 11 of the 2018 Tour de France. Photo ? James Startt, Agence Zoom

The second rest day sliced through the Tour and marked two weeks down with one week to go.

Our Let'sGo–Scott team spent this much-needed marker in the Aude region of South Central France. Our hotel for the two-night stay, although with three other teams, was away from all the action, nestled amongst the rolling vineyards that scatter the landscape of this stunningly beautiful part of France - the perfect environment to re-gather ourselves before we head in the into the final week.

With everyone rested and relaxed it was a day to reflect on our Tour so far, accept that things hadn't panned out for us yet and then look collectively toward focusing on a stage win during the final week.

The first two weeks have given our team nothing but struggles but our main battle has been carrying the belief that we can pull off a stage win in the last week. It is amazing that although the Tour de France is long and hard, when you get to this point of the race you stack up the opportunities left against your resources remaining and the possibilities don't always seem overly abundant.

It's no secret that the Sky team seem to have had a strangle hold on the race since they took the lead on the first mountain stage and since then have not looked like faulting.

Most of the talk around them now seems to be as to how they are going to manage the situation holding down first and second on the overall classification with Geraint Thomas leading and Chris Froome at 1:39 down. Naturally, the message coming from the Sky team seems to be that it is not important who wins as long as it is a Sky rider.

I took a brief glance through the history books and they tell a re-occurring story of teams that in similar situations ended in a breakdown of camaraderie that the teams profusely said was never going to happen.

In most cases, one of the riders has still won the race but you can almost be certain things will never be the same from there on in. With Sky themselves there was the Wiggins vs Froome rivalry in 2012 where Froome was clearly climbing better although the team backed Wiggins for the win.

In the Astana team of 2009 there was the Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador battle. In 1986 Greg Lemond's team-mate, French legend Bernard Hinault and the winner of the Tour the previous year, tried to stick it to Lemond and the two ended up racing each other to Paris where Lemond took his first of three Tour de France yellow jerseys.

Even as far back as the 1940's, rising Italian star Fausto Coppi upstaged the Italian hero of the era, Gino Bartali, to kick off one of the greatest rivalries in Italian cycling. Whatever comes of it for Sky this week, it will need some careful management and is sure to be big part of the final show, with Tom Dumoulin still within striking distance and looking ever stronger. There is still plenty of excitement waiting to be dished out.

Dumoulin is also the current world time trial champion so the two Sky riders will not want to lose any more time to him before next Saturday's time trial.

This year's edition has been a particularly tough one so far and this will compound the pressure on everyone coming into the last week.

I am not sure that I have experienced such a hard Tour de France before. It is generally accepted that the Tour de France, although the more prestigious than other Grand Tours, the Vuelta a Espana and Giro d'Italia, is normally easier with less climbing and a more traditional balance of climbing, sprint and medium mountain stages.

This year's Tour however, seems to have bucked that theory. I don't ever recall having so many riders being eliminated by missed time cuts; riders hopping off mid-race and the non-climbers having to dig to the depths of their determination to just to finish stages.

It has made many guys very nervous and the grupetto that is the collective group containing the sprinters normally forming at the backend of the race on the mountain stages is non-existent as each rider battles on only thinking of themselves.

We have spent the rest day talking through our options and with some tough days in the Pyrenees we still have some excellent options. Our workers will have to be there to make sure that our climbing specialists, Adam Yates and Mikel Nieve, can make the right moves and then it will be game on.

We have no doubt that they can win a stage and we just have to use our bullets wisely so that they get in the right breakaway that will go for the stage win. We have plenty of big strong boys that can make that happen.

Julian Dean is a former professional cyclist and high-performance manager of Let'sGo-Scott.