Le Tour

[ex-khobar Andy]

Promises to be an interesting Tour. Gob's compatriot Geraint Evans won the first time trial stage which was messy in rainy Dusseldorf.

I reckon it will be between Froome and his old teammate Richie Porte; although Froome gained half a minute or so over Porte today, Porte can make that up in one good day, so I won't be putting any money on it. Three weeks of getting up early to watch it live. For the last several years I have had to catch up with the late night recap and tried to stay off the interwebs during the day. One advantage of being out of work is that I can see it live. Should be fun. Being there to watch the peleton go through is still on my bucket list.

Subplot - Eddie Merckx had 34 stage wins - will Mark Cavendish match that record this year?

[RayThom]

Rumor has it that Lance Armstrong is going to be one of the "mixologists" on USA's Team Cannondale-Drapac's magic bus aptly named "DeTour" during its requisite mobile doping sessions.

Here's Lance (on the left out of camera view) on a practice run holding one of the many IV bags that will be needed to insure completing de Tour in respectable time.

[rubato]

And a late appearance by the very determined Taylor Phinney:




https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/spor ... l-why.html


yrs,
rubato

[Guinevere]

No comments on l'affaire de coude?

Check out the "Stages" podcast for daily recaps and dicusussions. Whatever you think about the cheater Armstrong, no one knows the inside scoop like he does. My Swede and I are enjoying it immensely. If somewhat reluctantly .

[Sue U]

No comments on l'affaire de coude?

Check out the "Stages" podcast for daily recaps and dicusussions. Whatever you think about the cheater Armstrong, no one knows the inside scoop like he does. My Swede and I are enjoying it immensely. If somewhat reluctantly .

Pffft.....Check out Tour de Pharmacy (it's pretty hilarious, and neary everyone in the world is in it -- including a pretty funny Lance Armstrong):

[Bicycle Bill]

Looks like something being produced by the "Jackass" crew or someone with similar ideas of what constitutes 'humor'.  Even so, I'd watch it .... maybe once, just out of curiosity.

But I'm not going to sign up for HoBo, Hoo-doo, Wetstix, or any of the other streaming services just to do so, so unless I find it on the 'net as an upload to Youtube or something like that, I suppose I never will.

-"BB"-

[BoSoxGal]

Looks like silly fun - but I got more excited about the Borg/McEnroe movie trailer that came after, that one looks terrific!

[RayThom]

It's nice to see Lance Armstrong finally accepts the fact that he is a mere parody of himself. He appears to be pedaling like hell in his race to redemption. Maybe he'll finish drug free.

[Long Run]

Determined Tour De France Biker Finishes Stage With Opponent Stuck In Spokes

[Long Run]

Couple of awesome days in the Pyrenees, started with a "pow"!

[Burning Petard]

Yesterday was the only day I watched it live. Great viewing. But NBC had to plug it as if they were trying to get stereotypical NASCAR fans. In the promos, they kept showing crashes. I saw lots of great riding. I never thought Phinney would still be in the Tour at this point. But he does have a great pedigree.

snailgate

[Bicycle Bill]

Yesterday was the only day I watched it live. Great viewing. But NBC had to plug it as if they were trying to get stereotypical NASCAR fans. In the promos, they kept showing crashes. I saw lots of great riding. I never thought Phinney would still be in the Tour at this point. But he does have a great pedigree.

snailgate

Like it or not, crashes are one of the few things that will unquestionably take a rider out of the Tour.  You can see someone like Alberto Contador get dropped on a climb like happened Wednesday, or the leader get blocked out of the final sprint and lose his yellow jersey, but unless you're really into the sport a person wouldn't know the potential gravity of this; all it does is give the announcers something to speculate about for the next hour (or day) or so.  But when someone crashes and they load him onto a gurney with a neck brace on, that's pretty damned definitive.

And I feel it's a sign of the times. They're playing to people like Marshall Neely, who was apprehended after being recorded by a cyclist's Go-Pro camera as he intentionally drove his SUV into the cyclist's riding partner on the Natchez Trace Parkway and then continued on his merry way, and the rest of the anti-cyclists whose comments on this incident were more-or-less as expected.  While many of these people are (when safely and anonymously commenting from behind their computers) quite frankly all bluff and bluster and — I hope, anyway — are not going to be going around using their hood ornaments as a front sight, the sense of schadenfreude they feel in seeing one of these riders crashing off the road into a fence, up an embankment, into an unyielding rock wall, or hitting the pavement after getting tangled up in someone else's handlebars cannot be denied.

-"BB"-

[Lord Jim]

In the promos, they kept showing crashes.

They have crashes in bike races?

Well in that case I guess I'll have to check it out...

[Burning Petard]

L J, I hope you were being ironic. Scroll back up and look at the work on Phinney's leg. On Thursday, a rider decided he could not go on and withdrew from the race--AFTER breaking his left arm and hand in a crash Wednesday and riding Thursday for more than 40 miles at better than 25 miles per hour including a couple of category I climbs I would have to walk my bike up if I expected to get to the top. Unlike NFL players, they did NOT shoot him up with painkillers and send him back out.

snailgate

[Burning Petard]

Great race yesterday. The stage today is an individual time trial. Each rider starts and rides by himself over the route. They leave one at a time, in reverse order, one minute apart. That is, the rider in last place start first and From, the leader in the Yellow Jersey starts last, with information about how his two closest riders are doing out on the course. He only leads by 30 seconds over the rider in third. The final starters with have a bigger time gap between them as they start.

But I think this is a made-for-tv stage. [perhaps they all are] IT IS TOO DAMN SHORT ! ! !

14 miles. I am guessing any of them, even the slowest, can do this in less than half an hour. The bikes are equipped with sensors measuring their speed, the rpm the rider is spinning, and most important, how much power the rider is putting into the pedals. And the rider is wired up with heart rate and lots of other biometric information. This all goes in real time to the team support crew and they have radio connection telling the rider what he must do to maintain his maximum output over the distance. Greg LeMond destroyed his challenger in that final time trial without this input. This stage today will only be a race of little truths.

snailgate

[Guinevere]

Definitely a short course - but so cool, winding through Marseille.

Taylor Phinney just caught four of the five men ahead of him and blistered the course in 29:21!

[RayThom]

Ooh, the excitement is palpable.

Go team!

[Burning Petard]

Go Team? ? ? I only wish it were so. There is no team team trial this year, none for too long. A team time trial is a real team effort, with group tactics and individual sacrifice.

snailgate

[Long Run]

It was a terrific race this year. The organizers kept it close by limiting the time trials. The team time trial is fun to watch, but it can be very unfair to a top rider with a weak time trial team.

[Guinevere]

I love the TTT - my most favorite Tour stages ever. It's not unfair, but part of the strategy you have to plan for when composing your team. I think they have so much drama, and make the race more interesting.

Sky and Froome. Yawn. I'm sure they're dopers. And they're boring as anything.