I had to skip out on the final 10km of today’s Tour stage, as Herself’s mom was in town and we were off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to wallow in critterage.

But I can’t let the day go by without saying how cool this Graham Watson photo is.

As a longtime comic-book fan, I look at this and see echoes of Neal Adams’ treatment of The Batman, The Avengers, The X-Men and other caped crusaders. It makes the riders appear superhuman, yet still capable of suffering; a reminder, I suppose, that even when we suspect a rider of breaking the rules, he still has to race the race.

And the zoo? Extra cool. I haven’t been there in years, and while there were a few disappointments — the Amur tiger was in hiding, for example — the otters were a hoot. And the only thing that beats watching a grizzly dog-paddle around in a glass-walled pond on a hot day is watching a pair of lar gibbons — both of them missing left hands after injury and amputation — swinging around their cage as if nothing had ever gone awry.

And there were the meerkats, of course. They look like a bunch of little old men who survived the apocalypse and somehow crossbred with prairie dogs. This little dude looks like Charlton Heston minus the firearm and the Second Amendment attitude.