Crash Course: TdF

Excellent collection of gasps and ohs on the Star's sports page today. See the carnage here. The first four stages have all featured race-changing pile-ups with most notable disappointment being Saxo-Bank's Frank Schleck's tour-ending broken collar bone (in three places, requiring immediate surgery ... owww). Schleck was considered a GC contender, but looks like he'll be on an extended rest.

If you want to follow the tour, but don't have OLN, follow the live blogs on http://www.letour.fr/ or http://www.velonews.com/. Not the same as seeing it on screen, but better than nothing! Racing begins at 8:30am and goes until approximately 11:30. OLN usually does an evening show of race highlights, but this year it is notably absent.

Finally, check out this photo ... what's the caption? (Left: Alberto Contador. Right: Lance Armstrong. They get along like oil and vinegar.)

Oh, and by the way ...

Countdown to Le Tour!

Just under five more days to go until my annual interest in road cycling is sparked. Running from Saturday July 3rd to Sunday July 25th 2010, the 97th Tour de France will be made up of 1 prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,642 kilometres.

Stage Profiles:

• 1 prologue
• 9 flat stages
• 6 mountain stages and 3 summit finishes
• 4 medium mountain stages
• 1 individual time-trial stage (52 km)
  

By the way, the Prologue is in the Netherlands! Format? Individual Time Trial.

Rotterdam is an awesome Dutch city, although when you go there, you feel like you've been beamed out of Europe. Since it suffered so much damage during the war, it had to be rebuilt and hence feels much more modern than the cobblestones and steeple-centric layouts of its neighbouring cities.

The Dutch have hosted Le Grand Depart more times than any of France's other neighbouring countries. If you want to know why, read these few lines, written in L’Équipe in 1954, when the Grande Boucle decided to start outside French borders for the very first time: “All of the Netherlands seemed to have gathered on the roads of Wassenaar, Delft, Rotterdam… Tens of thousands of spectators in closed ranks, uninterrupted, for kilometres and kilometres, clapping, cheering for everything that had to do with the Tour, the cyclists, the motorcyclists, the cars that followed or that led… [In this way] they made a triumph of the first stage!”

Yep, that sounds like the Netherlands to me.

When the Tour gets rolling, I'll be at home in Port Elgin, so I will hopefully get to see the opening stages on a real TV instead of following the live updates from a computer screen. The one month of the year I wish I had cable!

Vive le tour!!