Oh, Bill Strickland—you sir, are a troublemaker. Tweeting about RadioShack TdF exclusion rumors three days before the start of the race and giving everyone Puerto flashbacks.

While I was very glad to see your attention-grabbing release of the eff-bomb quote from the epilogue of your book—it does take the tired pre-Tour mantra of choice up a notch—I can’t say I support Twitter-mongering like that. Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle.

Versus hosted its media call for the 2010 Tour de France today, with Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen, Tyler Farrar, Christian VandeVelde and Levi Leipheimer all on the line at one point or another.

Highlights for me were Tyler saying the exposure to Dutch roads at the Giro will probably make things worse for the Tour, Phil saying the Schlecks “don’t have the brains” of Greg LeMond or Stephen Roche, and VandeVelde telling Phil not to drink too much while watching the race.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The whole call runs 41:15. Here’s an mp3 version; notes on where to find what are below.

Bah. You know, back in the day, this sort of thing required at least a modicum of skill. You’d look at the calendar, notice the week-and-a-half that had passed without any real news, see the Tour was about to start and you’d write something like “I sense a dope story is near”. People were once very impressed by that.

But no. Now you’ve got your rumors and your blogs and people just up and posting it and suggestive no-details Tweets that blossom out into a variety of @-replies and “what’s-that-supposed-to-means” until absolutely everyone already knows and the NYT has to print a story early.

I’ve been doing a little video work on some sprinting footage ahead of the Tour de France. I’ve looked through the Cavendish crash more times than I care to remember, but I still cannot get over the break Juan Antonio Flecha catches as the race just dissolves in front of him.

Here’s a quick video analysis to brighten up your Friday:

(right-click for iTunes download, tap for iPod/iPhone/iPad)

I realize I burn off a lot of text trying to drive the point home. This screenshot probably does a better job:

Ever since I began the making How The Race Was Won videos, my propensity for mispronunciation has become more and more embarrassing.

In many ways, it’s not my fault—well over 90% of the information I consume on the sport comes from web text, which doesn’t do a great job of conveying linguistic nuance. In the rare instances when I do get access to an Anglophone talking about cycling in English, it’s usually Phil Liggett, who’s been known to maul a surname or two.

It must be getting close to Tour time because emails from PR firms are starting to roll in again. It’s a strange distribution model, really—especially for books.

Come up with an idea, send out a bunch of letters to convince some company to pay you to write it, and have that company in turn hire another company to tell people about it. If only technology existed for writers to write something and deliver it to everyone themselves.

The Tour de Suisse was interesting this year. Not so much because of the battle for general classification, which all but defaulted into Frank Schleck’s hands, but because of the storylines it sprang for the upcoming Tour de France.

Most obvious would have to be that dazzling crash among the sprinters on Stage 4. We rely on the action of the fastmen to carry the Tour through its first week, and of the would-be TdF stage contenders at the race, only Oscar Freire and winner Alessandro Petacchi emerged unscathed.

Finally! The race formerly known as Dauphine Libere gets a rundown, focused almost entirely on the L’Alpe du Huez stage. It’s too bad, really—there were some great finishes on the other days, but stage races are tricky to video summarize like this.

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download, tap for iPad/iPhone]

Much of the delay was due to some major changes to production, including a better microphone and higher-quality source material. Ostensibly, the video is from Eurosport, but I think we all know there’s at least one intermediary involved. Still images, freely-licensed when available, are attributed in this list of sources.

Right—so it’s taking longer to get squared away than I thought. Curtain rods need to be hung, boxes need to be returned, broken iPhones need to be repurposed, etc., etc. I have video from the L’Alpe stage at Dauphine, but realized halfway into production, that still have no mic; fortunately, I also have no job, so I’m thinking the HTRWW on that will be out tomorrow.

But returning to the Dauphine—I’ve been pretty ambivalent about one-week stage races in the past. They always seemed like the Euro-Pro equivalent of Tuesday night training crits, where the real leg-smashers work to hone form while only a handful of widely-derided second-tier riders take them seriously.