Attention turns towards the Tour

After almost a week to allow the dust to settle on a fantastic Giro d'Italia, thoughts slowly began to turn towards the next Grand Tour of the season: The Tour de France. And with it comes some week long stage racing to fine tune those who consider themselves favourites as each looks to lay down a psychological marker on his rivals or perhaps see how much work he still has to do.

The first of these is the Critérium du Dauphiné and it's already underway. Two stages in now and you would have to say already, it's advantage Alberto Contador. The Spaniard won the opening up-hill prologue in spectacular fashion putting 13sec into Chris Froome over the 3.9km, 9.7% average gradient climb. Richie Porte only lost 6sec, but others lost a lot more: Mikel Landa, 44sec; Thibaut Pinot, 52sec; Fabio Aru, 1min 8sec.

I'd expect Froome to start to come good later in the week and you'd certainly expect better from Aru. Contador looks sharp though, skinnier than in many years and surely desperate for one last crowning glory in July. Froome might hope that the Tinkoff rider is peaking a month too soon, but the fact is, Contador knows what he is doing. There's some huge climbing stages in this race towards the later part of this week however and that's where we'll truly see each pretender to win the Tour's form.

Today's stage finished not long ago and it was a rare flat one on this eight day race. It was won by Nacer Bouhanni with no time losses by the contenders.

Another pre-Tour warm-up race is the Tour de Suisse and that starts next Saturday with Sky's Geraint Thomas looking to prove himself as the main domestique to Chris Froome, or indeed a viable plan 'B' should anything go wrong with the two time Tour winner. Someone not racing either is Nairo Quintana who is opting instead to do the Route du Sud, a race he won in 2012, which starts on the 16th June.

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Rider of the week

Alberto Contador's climb on the prologue of the Dauphine was impressive but how about Bryan Coquard? The Boucles de la Mayenne isn't as prestigeous as the Dauphine but it had a solid field and the Frenchman won the prologue, the 2nd stage of three in all, and took the general classification.