le Tour

...because la Tour is the Tower.

But I digress. Clark's been blogging a lot about the Tour in the last week, and it's been a while since I've posted here, so I thought I'd put down a few thoughts.

The Tour this year has been really interesting, partly because no rider in this year's Tour has ever won before. It's wide open. No defending champion is riding - in fact, there currently isn't a defending champion at all, since Floyd Landis still has not been declared the official winner from 2006. But that's a story for another day.

Without Floyd ('06), Lance ('99-'05), or Jan ('97), the peloton is a bit empty. We're even missing CSC sport director Bjarne Riis ('98) because he decided not to come to the race this year since he admitted to doping during his winning year.

As a result, the peloton seems a little lost. No one rated a real GC (general classification) contender has been putting in attacks. No gusto. No guts. Again and again during yesterday's stage, the announcers questioned why no one was dropping the injured Vinokourov and Kloden (both major talents on the Astana team). Why the GC contenders all huddled together on the mountain.

So here we are on the first rest day, only one day left of the Alps, and it's all a muddle. The Flying Chicken is in yellow, of all things!

[Side note: two years ago when Danish rider Mikael Rasmussen first took the lead in the King of the Mountains competition, he got the polka-dot jersey. In following days, he later added polka-dot shorts, helmet, sunglasses and bike to the ensemble. Goodness knows what the man will do with yellow.]

So who do I think will win? I have no idea. No one seems to. It would be nice for Levi Leipheimer (Discovery Channel) to win, adding to the American winning streak, but I don't think he has it in him. The most dangerous man still riding is Alexandre Vinokourov, but he's riding with 15 stitches and his man backup man has a broken coccyx. It remains to be seen whether he can really come back from his stage 5 crash to win the whole thing, but if gambling were legal, that's where I'd put my money.

The thing about Vino' is this: he's nuts. He came in third a few years ago. He's won pretty much everything else. In 2005, he won the (usually ceremonial) final stage on the Champs Elysees, just because he can. I mean seriously. That stage is 60 km of chitchat followed by a sprint. And he's not even a sprinter. Then in 2006, he wasn't allowed to ride because too many of his teammates were DQ'd for doping. That's got to make him mad. He's out to prove something now. Keep an eye on him.

One last word: poor T-Mobile. Yesterday they lost three guys - and yellow! One withdrew as planned (this was his first Tour, and you don't always plan on finishing your first) but two others crashed out. Team leader Michael Rodgers rode bravely after a bad crash on a mountain descent, but ultimately had to face up to the fact that you can't ride up mountains with a dislocated shoulder. Then, after the stage ended and everyone was heading to their hotel rooms, his teammate Patrick Sinkewitz* crashed into a fan on the road, fracturing his cheekbone and putting the fan in a coma. All of this just 24 hours after Linus Gerdemann, a 24-year-old T-Mobile rider no one had ever heard of before, went out on a breakaway and won the stage along with the yellow jersey. C'est le Tour!

Another famed rider, Stuart O'Grady, also crashed on the way to the hotel, breaking his ribs and puncturing a lung. Maybe next time these guys should wait for the team car, no?


*last name unspellable; all names in this post are approximate.