After Lance Armstrong retired last year, the Tour de France will certainly be more passionate. Nobody gets off with better chances than the others. If we were to make a list of those who are going to fight for the Champs Elysees win, that's going to be harder than it was in the previous years. It was pretty simple then. It was Lance Armstrong all the way. This edition, it's Basso, Ullrich and Mancebo. It could have been one more - Alexander Vinokourov - but the Kazakh had to pay the price for his team's involvement with the "Saiz affair".

And, much like in every other Tour de France edition, the mountain stages are going to be crucial. Everyone knows that a sprinter or a poor time-trial cyclist could not hope for much in the French competition. But the mountains are where the champs will get away from the chumps. The only question is what will be the stage that will decide the next winner of Le Tour.

In the last 4 or 5 editions, it was either Alpe d'Huez, or Mont Ventoux. The latter remind us of the wonderful fight between American Lance Armstrong and Italian Marco Pantani. The "pink" Italian went on and squeezed the win on the final meters, after Armstrong reportedly gave him the Go-Ahead. Nevertheless, both cyclists were champions and, if it weren't for that doping scandal in which Pantani was involved, it would have stayed forever in the hearts of cycling fans.

This year, Francisco Mancebo - who finished the Tour 4th last year - thinks that the final battle will be Alpe d'Huez. Although he knows he'll have a shot at the end, the AG2R Spaniard admits that a good run in that particular mountain stage will give him a good chance of finishing in front and, maybe, even win Le Tour.

"I think everything will be decided on the Alpe d'Huez, because the Izoard is too far from the finish, and in the Lautaret nothing normally happens. Between Lautaret and Alpe d'Huez there are a lot of kilometers, so if someone breaks away from that far he could be caught quite easily. So this stage will be played out in the Alpe d'Huez, which is certainly the most mythical climb in the Tour, but it is just one climb. The next stage is the Queen stage of the Tour for me", said Mancebo.

Well, we'll just have to wait and see whether he's wrong or not. The Alps, much like the Pyrenees, can bring important gaps between the riders. And, let's not forget about Galibier, one of the toughest climb in the tour this year. All of this makes you jump to the mountain stages and leave the flat ones behind. But there's going to be time for all of it, starting July the 1st.