The Big Hook came for HTC’s Mark Renshaw today. He head-butted Garmin’s Julian Dean — not once, not twice, but thrice as Dean tried to bring Tyler Farrar to the line in stage 11 — and then once Mark Cavendish had safely launched off his wheel, Renshaw took a quick peek over his shoulder, saw Farrar coming and tried to ride him into the barriers.
“Right, off you go,” said race officials. “Good,” says I. That was a mean, dangerous and totally unnecessary bit of aggro’ bullshit in a Tour that has already seen way too many dudes on the deck with broken bones.
Dean had it exactly right afterward, saying: “What we do is very dangerous and we don’t need behavior like that to make it even more dangerous.”
Mad Blog Media 
I’ll be sure to boo loudly tonite when I watch the TIVO!
Yeah, we haven’t seen head that bad since McEwen was giving head to O’Grady!!
Betcha Bill Clinton wouldn’t complain. After all, Renshaw’s better looking than Monica.
What about relegating Cavendish to last place on the day? He benefited from Renshaw’s aggressive riding, so why does Cav and the Columbia-HTC team get the benefit of the win?
Mr. Pelkey gave Renshaw the “wanker of the day” award this morning during the Live Update, prior to the official dismissal. Good call, CP. Those VeloNews guys, they’re pretty sharp.
Hell… That was nothing. I remember watching Gibby Hatton riding the kerin years ago. Now there was some head butting.
And now we have VeloNews editor at large John Wilcockson — who has only covered about a thousand Tours, starting back when the guys rode stone wheels — chiding the peloton for spinning along with its collective thumb up its keister waiting for Super Spaniard and Boomschleckaleckalecka to fight it out in the Pyrénées.
I love this piece, because it reminds me that the Tour once was packed with the sort go-to-hell types that made the race fascinating back in the day. Claudio Chiappucci, Jacky Durand, Laurent Jalabert — they didn’t study the Lombardi method, they went out to kick ass and take names.
Writes JW: “It’s not worthy of the Tour when the peloton falls into formulaic tactics and ignores stages that could play a significant role.”
Damn right. Someone with a pair of brass ’nads crowding his chamois and a team that could give a shit about who finishes first loser could make life really interesting for the two self-announced faves in the Massif Central. Derail the Astana and Saxo choo-choos before they get a chance to leave the station and we might have us a bike race.
No Shit! Sure miss the likes of the 7-11/Motorola pre-LA boys, or Kelly,Indurain,Delgado,Bugno,numerousNorthernEuroClassicsRacers, how do Paul,Phil, andBobke cover this current batch of asses?
Did you catch where JW sort of chided even BigTex? Shocking. Nice job, JW, somebody with some history of seeing the race needed to write a bit like this.
With Kloden and Leipheimer up front battling for a top ten, WTF was Big Tex doing today, anway? 57th place? Seems he might as well go home and resume drinking beer.
Maybe Contador needs to send BigTex one of those tweets about “there’s no I in team”? He’s still got time to be a good gregario and go out on a positive note in his last Beeg Shew. I can’t help but feel The Belgian and Co have no hopes for Leipheimer in this race, despite any rhetoric to the contrary. I don’t understand the media frenzy about Contador making a mistake by somehow not letting Vino win today — what was he supposed to do about Rodriguez, crash him out? This is the same controversy stirred up years ago at the World’s when Boyer was dying in front and LeMond chased but didn’t win.
I was mopping the floor with the TV on today when Alberto attacked on the climb, and I almost put the mop handle through the ceiling hollering as he dropped Schleck. That was a good jump he got, and if Andy Hood really thinks that “…Ten seconds might not mean much…” he ought to have a chat with Greg LeMond, here chasing down his two-minute man, Pedro Delgado.
http://videos.apnicommunity.com/Video,Item,3170701285.html
You mean this Tour thing is supposed to be exciting? Like a baseball game? Or like a basketball game tied at 150 with 3.2 seconds left?
I’d say “a soccer game tied at 0 with 45 minutes left to go” but that ain’t much. When is this monotony over? When does cross season begin?
“Exciting like a baseball game”? Surely you jest. That’s like “military intelligence.” Cycling, like soccer (football here or calcio in Italy) will always be understood and enjoyed better by Europeans while most ‘Muricans just shake their heads and go to the fridge for another watery beer. I’m far from a Contador fan (since he was on the Puerto list and so far has not been punished in any way) but I’m starting to like his attacks of the whiner Andy Schleck. But we still need a few other guys to get up there to make this any sort of memorable Tour de France.
Well, the riders are playing the game to win, and if ASO is going to make the rules as they did this year, we should expect a day like today to be boring and predictable as hell. Want exciting racing? Create a race with opportunities to win. Look at the Giro this year, up in the air almost to the end. Look at the cobble stage in this year’s Tour. Goddamn that was great. When given (or forced into) a situation that opens the race, the racers race.
ASO’s stuck on their formula (probably for money reasons), and it doesn’t look like they have much interest in changing. This opens the door to the organizers of the Giro and the Vuelta to surpass the Tour. Quelle dommage. ASO has such power they could put the riders on tricycles next year and get away with it.
I’m no fan of the French but I give them credit for putting in the difficult road sections (as the Giro organizers did) to make their stage race a truer test of all-round ability rather than just a simple VO2 max or watt output contest as Frandy Schleck seems to want. If all these whiners don’t like the route ASO lays out they can simply stay home! I don’t see a lot of reason for ASO to mess with their tried-and-true format too much, though less time-trialing is always better than more…we can all remember the 70+ km borefests of the BigMig daze…those years were rarely exciting in my memory and I was there in-person for all of ’em.