Remember the 2003 Tour? When an IMAX film crew (search “Hamilton”) followed Tyler Hamilton around? Well, Cyclingnews finally got a review of the finished product out. Though I wouldn’t put too much stock in their evaluation of the piece (they’re running ads for the feature on their homepage – though they did have the good sense not to run the ad side-by-side with the review, as Daily Peloton did here), they did get some interesting comments from the filmmakers on their decision to change the movie’s focus onto Jimmy Caspar and Baden Cooke:

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So for those of you who’ve been under a rock for the past week, there’ve been some protests in France over a new job law, designed to decrease youth unemployment by making young workers easier to fire. Young folks are upset about this, I guess (not to further any stereotypes about the French being lazy, but apparently they just don’t like working…), so upset that they’ve gone out and delayed the start (scroll to bottom) of some bike races. Fortunately, Sammy Dumoulin, one of they very few young Frenchmen both employed and able to be fired, took the win at that event, as if to say “you go and you sign that law, Monsieur Chirac!” It seems that Spain and England (or is it Germany?) must have similar laws protecting less-effective workers, as otherwise all of Euskatel (the squad is winless thus far this season), and ProCycling (the site just put out this Dauphiné preview when it’s still three monuments and a Grand Tour away), would be out of work.

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Discovery Channel seems like a normal team, most of the time. Even back in the Lance days, they’d go about their business in a nice, ordinary fashion, getting into breaks, taking pulls, occasionally winning, mostly not, and just, you know, fitting in with the other guys. But every so often, like at the Tour, or the last stage of the ‘05 Dauphine they do something utterly ridiculous, just to remind you that they can. Today’s final Day of Pain was like that. In the horrifically windy morning session, they cranked their leader Hoste back to within sight of stage winner Stephen De Jongh and his bus-sized teammates, before going 1-2-3 in the afternoon TT, making such heinously good time in the process that 10 riders dropped off the final GC due to the time cut.

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So I guess maybe yesterday’s sprint just wasn’t hard enough for Bernhard Eisel, as he managed to beat 30 other guys in today’s finish (and by good margin, too). But since yesterday, today, and the remaining Day of Pain, are just an appetizer for the Ronde this weekend, the real impact of today’s stage was who got hurt. Other notables looking at a trip to the DL: Magnus Backsteadt, down with a tendon injury, Jan Ullrich, out of Sarthe with an irritated knee, and *gasp* Tom Boonen (scroll down) slightly inconvenienced with a cold?! Tom better not be sick for Tour of Flanders, otherwise no one will know what to do. The race will unfold like a dinky Cat 4 race, with everyone sucking wheels and “waiting for the sprint” because they had planned for months to simply “mark Boonen”. And if that happens, it’s gonna take a lot more than an ANSI/SNELL certified helmet to keep riders safe from the hail of empty Stella Artois bottles this Sunday. Now Rolf Sorensen’s 1997 win, that’s how you do it. Bridge up to the break, drop it, get caught, get into another move, and then finish it off with a sprinter-foiling attack at 1km to go.

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I apologize for another late post. Fortunately, there’s not too much on the News-o-Meter to cover today. THE FIRST RULE OF TOUR OF FLANDERS CLUB IS: You not talk about Tour of Flanders Club. THE SECOND RULE OF TOUR OF FLANDERS CLUB IS: You do not talk about Tour of Flanders Club. THIRD RULE: No shirt, no shoes. FOURTH RULE: Actually, the real rules are here (scroll to “Five rules”), along with a hidden fifth rule about waving flags in front of riders, which is actually the first rule (they made it last year), probably in response to a flag getting caught in Leif Hoste’s wheel about 230k into the ‘04 Roubaix. Speaking of the Discovery rider, he snared his first win of the season at Three Days of Pain, today, smoking Pez’s early Flanders pick (scroll to bottom) Gert Steegmans, and Bernhard Eisel, who’s no slouch himself, in a three-up sprint. Most of the rest of the field rolling in a minute down, and in a race this short, that gap is significant.

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Well, if you watched Brabantse Pijl on Sunday morning, you were treated to a pretty good show. Oscar Freire bridged up to one late selection, then instigated a four-man move with a teammate, helped to draw back a 2-man attack with 5k to go, and then won the sprint. But this wasn’t enough for Nick Nuyens, who still thinks Freire shouldn’t have won (search “strongest”). Of course, Nuyens also wondered why CSC’s Karsten Kroon tried to break away with him late in the race; apparently the young Belgian isn’t familiar with the idea that two riders can be faster than one. I can’t blame the guy for being a little bitter, but should count his blessings that he wasn’t one of the poor saps chasing for Davitamon Lotto after it missed pretty much every move of the day. Cycling TV’s coverage of the race was pretty good, but it neglected to mention the burgeoning drug scandal that struck this week.

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Would you look at the article on Eurosport about today’s first stage of Criterium International? Talk about poor. Igor Astarloa is a “sprinter”? When his two biggest wins, the ‘03 Fleche Wallonne and ‘03 World Road Title, came at the top of, or immediately after, extremely steep hills? And his “ill-fated stints” with Cofidis and Lampre, that each happened in the same season? A better assesment of this situation might be to say that his teammates were on drugs, and he got caught up in the fallout. And calling Floyd Landis and Bobby Julich “Texans”? Un-fµ¢&ing-believable. Yeah, I’ve been known to botch a nationality from time to time (Cancellara, Parra, etc.), but I’ve never called a Sicilian a Tuscan or a Norman a Breton. And you know what else? I don’t get paid to write about cycling; the author of this article does. Some truly weak sauce indeed from Eurosport’s French correspondent. Anyway, as far as the racing went, some aggressive riding left Erik Dekker to spank Ivan Basso in a two-up sprint, and a select group of 9 in contention for the win.

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Yeah, so doping raids today in Belgium, yadda, yadda. Cops found some dope, some riders have been suspended, etc. I’m gonna wait until the smoke clears. These Belgian doping things always go on forever and involve quarter-million Euro fines and symbolic post-career suspensions. Anyway, ProCycling is now back on line but is kinda low on up-to-date news at the moment. In fact, it’s just kind of a slow day, outside those raids; Vino won predictably at Castilla y Leon; Danilo Napolitano took another notable win, but the GC at Coppi & Bartali remained largely unchanged. I guess the sweetest “news” I saw today was this feature on the legendary Battaglin Pirana, quite possibly the ugliest bike in the history of the sport. Just be sure to stop reading before the story before it turns into an ad. Oh, and I guess the sue-and-deny method of responding to doping charges, pioneered by Lance Armstrong, is catching on.

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Remember yesterday’s post, when I was critical of the race management at Dwars door Vlaanderen? Well, get this: the dude driving the Shimano neutral support car and blocking the chase this Saturday was the same freakin’ guy who pulled a similar stunt at last year’s Gent-Wevelgem! What the fµ¢& is he still doing driving neutral support vehicles? I’m no fan of the UCI, and it sure looks bad for them to have this guy still driving in their races (riders who cheat to win races get a two-year ban; drivers who cheat get a 200 Swiss Francs fine), but the people who really come out of this looking like total bunch of dickheads are the folks at Shimano. They fired this clown last year (search “Shimano”), to erase any “doubts about the neutrality of [their] vehicles” and now he’s right back behind the wheel. I’ve emailed the Big S asking for an explanation; who wants to bet I never hear back?

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Remember last year’s Gent-Wevelgem, when a neutral service vehicle inexplicably led Belgian Nico Mattan up to foreigner Juan Antonio Flecha in the final K? Well, at today’s Dwars door Vlaanderen relative unknown Frederik Veuchelen, another Belgian from a Belgian team and sole survivor of an earlier four-man break, held on to take the win ahead of a hard charging field. But he may have had some help, as, entering the final k with roughly 15 seconds’ lead, the race commissar neglected to pull a fleet of support vehicles out of the gap. Thus the peloton behind was sprinting into a wall of bumpers and exhaust pipes, and Ag2r’s Lloyd Mondory almost came to grief shooting the gap between a follow car and a support moto after crossing the line. It probably didn’t affect the overall win, but with the peloton snapping so closely at the breakaway’s heels, it just seems a bit suspicious, no?

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