Yawn. A cease-fire in the Pyrénées as Radio Shackstrong gets sixth out of a nine-man break.
“Is this fucking thing over yet?” asked one of my colleagues. “They should be paying us to watch this shit.”
“They are,” I reminded him.
“Not enough,” he replied.
After a rest day, then, it’s the big boy — stage 17 to the Col du Tourmalet, otherwise known as Schleckalecka’s Last Stand. Then it’s one for the sprinters, one for the time trialists and the interminable parade into Paris.
The wiseguys all seem to think that Pretty Boy needs a boatload of time on Super Spaniard going into that final time trial, but it beats me where the hell he’s going to find it. They seem evenly matched in the hills, and Saxo’s tow truck Jens Voigt laid it down at 70 kph again yesterday, enhancing his scab collection.
“Fortunately, I didn’t land on my face this time and I’m still alive,” he quipped. That there is a very hard individual, that Jens Voight fella. Dude probably broke the road when he went down.
Mad Blog Media 
Jens may be tough but Chuck Norris is tougher.
Last week we rode over the road that rose up to bite Jens last year when the race went through Italy. I thought about his big crash as we descended over the same section….kept both hands on the bars and watched where the hell I was going. Interestingly, coming back over into Italy later, just as I slowed down to check out a lunch spot, my front tire went flat. Talk about fortunate! The entire way down is switchbacks and the perfect grade to get some serious speed up so a flat front tire might have had me doing a Voight imitation.
What was yesterday’s stage on the “boring-meter”? 8 or 9 for sure. Each time they run a stage with the long descent into Pau I dismiss it as boring, but somehow am lured into watching the damn thing when it comes around, only to be bored once again.
Lil’ Andy and the rest of Contadors challengers are leaving it pretty late if they have any hopes of yellow in Pair-ee. I’m thinking if Andy can’t put a real, effective attack into “Il Pistolero” on Thursday he’s in danger of finding himself on the third step of the podium or worse, as some of those guys behind him can time-trial 50 kms a lot faster than he can. Somebody needs to do SOMETHING to move this race out of the “Le Beeg Bore” category.
He certainly did break the road. Where you or I may only dent it.
Here’s I’ve been off my bike and laying low the last week and a half trying to recover from the bumps, bruises and concussion that resulted from my “bike-self separation at speed” adventure, and I read about Jans just shaking off what sounded like something worse. Man, I feel like a wuss. Then again, compared to Jan I think we all end up looking like wusses.
I’m sure this isn’t an original thought (these days I’m glad I’m able to have a thought at all) but it occurs to me that the tendency of the Tour to string several mountainous days together in a row pretty much guarantees lackluster racing. All the big names play it safe through most of the mountain stages, reluctant to fry themselves with any action that might just be, you know,…exciting. As we all know, they save themselves for that one, big, important stage (which would be tomorrow). Now look at the Giro: generally speaking, mountain and flat stages are interspersed, allowing the big names a stage to recover from big efforts on those mountain stages. Now that makes for good racing.
I wonder if those guys from ASO who plan the tour route bother to read this blog? Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.
James, you’ve come up with some off-the-wall ideas in your day, but the idea that Chuck Norris could take on Jens in anything other than a bad facial hair contest might just be the most laughable.
What the Tour really needs is:
— a few stages that cross train tracks, a la Paris-Roubaix. Throw some miniature-golf-like crazy twists into the race.
— one day of BMX or trials riding for some Hans Rey action.
— a 2-up or 4-up time trial, like ski-cross.
— road furniture and traffic circles are fine, but how about a figure-8 course to give them some moving obstacles?
— fartlek stations where they have to dismount and do some pushups, chinups, or answer trivia questions.
— urban orienteering with an unpublished route. first one to the check point gets the coordinates for the next stop, and everyone else has to wait for a time check before they can move on. the first ten riders get the shortest, most direct route, the next ten get a slight detour, and so on.
— instead of getting thrown out of the race, folks like Renshaw that are judged to have committed violations get stuck with feed bag duty the next day. Other penalties: punished riders have to ride the course in reverse picking up gel wrappers and coke cans, or maybe post-ride laundry detail and chamois scrubbing.
Make ’em all ride 10 speeds, uh not 10 in the back but more like: 52/42 & 14-24 or 16-22, and for the TTs make ’em ride fixies! Old School hard men had strong legs/lungs not veins/vessels.
The Giro mountain stages end up bunched together by the topography though they do have a lot more transfers, which the riders HATE. The Giro is just a different (and better) race as I’ve written before but I don’t think the French organizers should try to duplicate it — they can’t. They might consider having more varied roads like they did this year with the Paris-Roubaix and L-B-L routes but the riders generally bitched about those, especially Frandy Schleck, so unless you prohibit somehow the go-slows imposed by the likes of Cancellara, what can ya do?I think the radio-control of racers is a big component of dull racing and guys with more knowledge and experience with the sport than me have said they need to get rid of them. That would be a great first step.
The wife has a theory that perhaps now that doping is getting tougher to get away with, perhaps the riders have sort of decided to neutralize certain stages they deem too difficult and race only on the days they agree on? Kind of a, “well, you won’t let us dope so we’ll just go slow and make the racing dull—take that!” kind of attitude. Only once all the dopers are gone can that change.
But the reality is Le Tour is rarely exciting, a real action-packed edition is the exception, not the rule. But the hype, especially in the US cycling press, is ALWAYS full-on “the greatest show in cycling” we’re promised every year but it rarely comes to pass.
I hope tomorrow’s stage action proves me wrong and this edition goes down in history as a great one. But I’m not holding my breath.
I have a bad shoulder from when I was in Vietnam teaching Kung Fu to Chuck Norris. He ain’t so tough.