What a travesty, turning the Col d’Aspin and the Col du Tourmalet into a couple of speed bumps en route to a two-up sprint that barely beat an 80-man dash to the line. Bor-ring. A la chingada con el Pyrénées, in this format, anyway. More Roberto Duran, less Gary Kasparov, please.
Meanwhile, Big Tex has transformed himself from The Great Stone Face to Chatty Cathy, briskly dispensing wisdom to fans and foes alike. Contador? Ambitious. Evans? Gutsy. Race radios? Stupid. The ’10 Tour? Maybe. We could change the name of the site to “VeloLance: The Journal of Competitive Lanceness” based on the volume of copy we got on him today, f’chrissakes.
I think I liked him better when he was stiff-arming the press. Sheeyit, a guy could get tired of Mozart if he heard too much of him.
No ride for Your Humble Narrator today. First it was too busy, then it was too hot, and finally it was too rainy. This is the weirdest Colorado summer I can recall, and I’ve seen plenty of ’em. We have three fans going on in the bedroom now, and I could still test a Cervélo P666 and a prototype asbestos Assos skinsuit in there. I want heat and humidity, I’ll move back to San Antone.
Mad Blog Media 
When did Mr. Bass take up cycling? Or is that Mr. Burton (the magician-Vegas entertainer)? Curious minds want to know…..
Tour de what, Patrick??? Yeah, that arrangement of peaks midstage is a sham.
Was hot and nearly cloudless here today, and we had two wildfires burning, to make the air pretty bad. One fire was burning south and one north of town. This all made the Tour de Los Alamos a little more like the Tour de Hades.
We had to check on one guy who overcooked it on the last climb and was escorted in by the EMTs for fear he would go into a heat and dehydration induced MI, and two women riders who not only DNF, but arranged an unannounced broom wagon pickup from one of their husbands and left our official broom wagon (yours truly, in the Furd Exploder) frantically scouring the course for missing riders. Oh, well…all in a day’s work. No one hurt or lost, good race for most of the peloton. I made it home in time to put some Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge for dinner, and get out on the deck to roust the grill from its slumber.
Told my old man back in Mississippi that it was a scorcher yesterday, with humidity in the 30% range, and the next thing I heard was the receiver hitting the floor and his palm slapping his thigh.
VeloNews is doing it right, focusing on what’s happening on two wheels and largely leaving the speculation and innuendo to folks like Sports Illustrated, People, and the National Inquirer. Neal’s work with the camera and mike has been outstanding, and C. Pelkey is his typical formidable self doing the Live Update Guy schtick.
I don’t know what kind of temps you’ve been sporting up in CO but it’s been over 100 most of the summer thus far here in San Antone…. worst summer in the 8 years I’ve been here. The other day the car was screaming at me telling me it’s 110 outside…. We can use some rain too. The sod I put down last year and had to mow every 4-5 days now looks like hay… I’m forcing water into my dog so he’ll keep having to go out and pee, since we are under water restrictions. Honest officer, it’s not a sprinkler, it’s a shih tzu!!
Its been a weird summer. Half the cars in Los Alamos County were badly damaged by a hailstorm last week (hail up to and including the size of tennis balls). My wife’s trusty Subaru was nearly totalled but is apparently fixable for slightly less than its book value. Not sure what we want to do with it. Lately my other half has been referring to her car as a rolling golf ball, due to its newly acquired texture.
Now, back to scorcher time….
Hail dents just make you more aero.
“Weird summer” about sums it up here, too. Massive amounts of rain, like I’ve never seen before (and I’ve summered here off and on since 1967). The heat is nothing like San Antone, where I remember spending a lot of time either in the pool or in our air-conditioned quarters on Randolph AFB, but we’ve had a stretch of 90s with humidity, a rara avis indeed in Bibleburg.
Now hail I could use. Great big shingle-smashin’ ice-balls. We need a roof, bad, and I’d like State Farm to pick up the tab in honor of all the premiums we’ve been paying.