So Mont Ventoux failed.

Mont Ventoux, that feller of champions, the Giant itself, failed spectacularly on a day when it was expected to provide a time-stopping, jaw-dropping, Kirk Gibson-esque moment to define this year’s Tour. Instead of providing for us a moment upon which stories were made, it maintained status quo.

And try as I might to resist, I enjoyed every moment.

In reality, Ventoux did define this year’s Tour de France. There, on the slopes of that most punishing climb of climbs, were all the storylines in one place, playing out together, interwoven as they always should have been.

There they were, giants of their sport climbing up a hill just as aptly nicknamed.

Contador, covering every move himself and proving, good or bad, that he’s the man meant to lead the peloton into Paris tomorrow.

Andy Schleck, the best young rider anyone has seen probably in my lifetime (22-plus years), scaling Ventoux with fury almost unmatched, but for a brother rather than himself. It wasn’t enough, but Andy turned the tables and worked as hard for his brother as the elder Schleck had for him all Tour long.

That brother, Frank, who worked perhaps harder than any other single rider in this year’s Tour for a brother whose time is arrived. Frank could be a team leader somewhere else, maybe a GC contender with the right pieces around him. But that’s not why he was where he was every day for the last three weeks.

Brad Wiggins, the most improbable of these names, desperate to cling to the top five in hopes of a bit of luck and a spot on tomorrow’s podium. Only at the end did this year’s surprise powerhorse break, belaying a future to look forward to.

And, of course, Armstrong. The comeback no one said possible — a fool’s errand, they called it — went from no where to somewhere to everywhere to the base of Mont Ventoux. And when the world’s absolute best slugged it out in the ultimate battle royale, a 37-year-old cancer survivor was with them along every desperate kilometer.

Maybe it seems Hollywood and maybe it’s disappointing, but tell me it wasn’t also a little bit poetic.

Paris tomorrow.

Alberto Contador’s final kick today inside the last 3K surely cemented his place atop the podium in Paris this year. But it also spoke volumes about what kind of teammate Contador is, at least within his current team.

Andrew Hood talked about it in his lastest VeloNews contribution, and needless to say, juicy quotage abounded.

Let’s set the scene: Contador, accompanied by the Schlecks and teammate Andres Kloden, reeled in Thor Hushovd and set themselves to finish top four on the stage. Then, with about 2K to go, Contador kicked into high gear, taking the Schleck Bros. with him and leaving struggling teammate Kloden behind.

Andy Schleck took the stage, and he and his brother moved to second and third overall, knocking Lance Armstrong off the podium and seriously denting Astana’s chances of putting three riders on the podium.

The issue at hand is this: Did Contador need to attack? With a comfortable lead of over 1:30 and possessing, at worst, top-five time trialing ability, not likely.

Johan Bruyneel certainly didn’t think so.

“I told him you don’t have to attack to win the Tour de France today, because the difference was there to Wiggins,” Bruyneel said after the stage. “It’s a bit of a pity that Andreas couldn’t hang on, because I think we could have been first, second and third on GC, and instead, we are first, fourth and fifth.”

And then he continued.

“I had advice not to do. He didn’t need to go,” Bruyneel said. “It was clear that the Schleck brothers would go full gas to the summit.

Lance Armstrong refrained, instead elect to “bite his tongue” when questioned about the incident. But even his tepid refusal suggests a questioning of the move itself.

It’s been beating to death that there were leadership issues (yes, here we go again) on team Astana. And we alllllll know by now that Contador expects his team’s support as the Tour winds down.

But two things became abundantly clear today: 1) He clearly didn’t trust his mates enough to rely on them, and 2) Even if he had their support, he clearly had no interest in returning the favor.

There are two kinds of bad guy in the Tour:

There are the hardcore, show-you-up, Armstrong-Landis types that you either love or hate. And then there are the ones who command your respect with their talent, but certainly not their petulance.

As Contador comes into his cycling prime, it’s beginning to look like he’s got a little bit too much of the latter, at least for my tastes.

Well, we’ve been waiting for this for awhile, haven’t we?

All questions answered, all riddles solved.

It’s Contador.

The spindly Spaniard crushed the field at the end of today’s stage, riding away from everyone — including teammate and everybody’s All-American Lance Armstrong — to take a comfortable lead in the Tour de France and put on the yellow for the first time in two years.

The suspense over which Astana strongman would end up with the lead of the race and of his team appears to have ended, as Contador now stands 1:37 ahead of Armstrong, the 2nd-place finisher, going into the final rest day.

“That’s not going to happen,” Armstrong said when asked if he would attack Contador’s lead. “There’s been a lot of drama between Alberto and me … but at the end of the day we sit as a team.”

This moment had been building for weeks leading up to the Tour, and Versus, the American network carrying coverage even used it as a sales pitch in promotional advertisements.

It’s fair to say, however, that it’s been resolved now, and it appears highly unlikely that we will see anyone but Contador wearing the maillot jaune from here on.

By now, let’s be honest, we’ve all heard that Levi Leipheimer is out of this year’s Tour, a tough break for the Californian (no pun intended). Moreover, we’ve heard that this hurts Lance’s chances at a record eighth Tour championship, with his right-hand man on the hurt wagon.

But does it go deeper than that?

When you looked at Astana’s roster coming into this year’s Tour — and you looked past the big four, Armstrong, Leipheimer, Alberto Contador and Andres Kloden (can’t not include a two-time runner-up in there) — the rest of the team was full of domestiques whose loyalties might determine exactly which of Astana’s big boys ended up on top, if any.

In Leipheimer and old boy Yaroslav Popovych, Armstrong had two top aides who, if the proverbial line were drawn in the sand, would cross with the Texan. Kloden, Paulinho and Dimitry Muravyev were obviously wild cards who could go either way, but it’s awfully hard to accept the idea that they would turn against the man who was one bad check away from financing Team Astana by himself.

But now, with Leipheimer out of the picture, Armstrong might find himself more or less alone, should it come to a high-noon showdown with his Spanish teammate.

It might come to pass that none of this matters, and we at PBT wouldn’t be at all sad if Big George shocked us all and stood atop the podium in Paris in a week’s time. But we aren’t holding our breath.

Alberto Nocentini’s ride thus far has been impressive, and a nice story. But Astana has too many horses, and too much talent, to be denied at least one more legitimate shot to take firm control of this race.

So that line in the sand is getting deeper, and longer, and it’s time for Astana’s other six to make their choice.

He might not be your cup of coffee, but Lance Armstrong is undeniably good for one thing every time he rides a Tour: an explosion of American media punditry on a sport no one cared about two weeks ago or will care about by the end of July.

Most columns and op/ed pieces tend to revolve around Lance the man, and his victories or faults.

But once in awhile, somebody somewhere puts an opinion to paper that is both original and uncommon. CBS Sports’ Greg Doyel has done just that.

Doyel, for whom I have a large amount of respect as a national (and this time international) sports columnist, essentially poses the argument: If Lance can beat almost-terminal cancer, win seven straight Tours, take three years off then return and still be at or near the top of the sport, is he really that good, or is cycling just terrible?

The venerated Doyel comes to the latter conclusion, evoking the mandatory comeback comparison to Michael Jordan, who Doyel aptly describes as “a shell of his former self” when Sir Altitude returned with the Wizards a few years on from retirement.

Through this analogy, Doyel paints a picture of the idea that “comebacks” tend to make painfully clear what coming back to the well one too many times will do to an athlete’s legacy. And yet, here is Armstrong, out in front again.

Doyel addresses doping in the way it probably should be addressed — that everybody who’s anybody does it anyway, so the cream of the crop should still rise.

So then, it must be cycling that is deficient, not the other way ‘round.

But here’s why Doyel is wrong:

First, to compare an instinctive sport like basketball to an endurance sport like cycling is folly.

Basketball — and for that matter football, baseball, soccer, etc. — is a sport built on reaction time and quickness. A half-second can mean the difference between a blocking foul or a charge, an easy dunk or a fumbling turnover.

Like most other sports, it’s also incredibly tough on the body. The day-to-day pound of getting up and down the court beats down the joints, ligaments and tendons, causing wear and eventually injury and a natural slowing of the quickness upon which previous success was built.

The effect that cycling has on the body is nothing like that of basketball. It causes minimal stress to anything but the muscles.

Furthermore, in cycling, instead of being instinctive reaction-based, is more anatomically driven.

Physically speaking, the heart of your professional cyclist is considerably larger than that of a normal person, giving the cyclist a clear sporting advantage due to his or her body’s ability to pump more blood through the body faster, helping muscles carry heavier workloads and recover more quickly.

Barring some pre-existing condition or artificial mistreatment, Lance Armstrong’s powerful heart (and subsequent VO2 max numbers, etc.) won’t just go away over time, the way Michael Jordan’s ability to beat a defender into the lane might.

The second flaw in Doyel’s argument comes in a simple understanding of the sport of cycling itself.

Sports like basketball, because they are driven by those aforementioned skills, are usual best played at a younger age. As time wears down the body, so will it wear down the skills.

Jordan’s best statistical years came between 1986 and 1993, from the time he was 23 to the time he was 29.

But because cycling is a sport that generally develops more slowly in the body and has more staying power due to the lack of wear-and-tear, most pros reach the peak of their careers well later than most athletes.

To turn Doyel’s argument back to him, Lance Armstrong won his first Tour when he was 27, and his last when he was 33. That stretch was almost identical to Jordan’s heyday in terms of length, but it came later, chronologically.

When Jordan came back from his foray into baseball, after a year away from the game, he was 31, and yet he still continued to perform at a high level for four more years. That’s right where Lance is right now, four years on and still likely lasting at the edge of his prime as a competitive cyclist.

No, cycling isn’t that bad, and Lance is no superman compared to how he performed from ‘99 to ‘05.

If anything, he’s been far more human than he used to be, a sign that yes, he is getting older. It’s just that the nature of his sport means he’ll reach the limits of his ability well later than many of his contemporaries in other sports.