More bad luck for the yellow jersey! Contador showing little deference to the nuances of the Tour! Lance failing to live up to the hype! It’s like I’m practically psychic!

In all seriousness, though, this is a Tour that has never wanted for drama or surprises—almost a shame, considering the fireworks we were treated to just over a month ago—and perhaps the best part of the excitement surrounding this year’s event is that so much of it is actually coming from the race. Uncomfortably thin margins separate the leaders in the GC, KOM and points competitions; battles among both the breakaways and the heads of state seem to be de rigueur over ever practically major climb, and hilltop finishes are no longer a pre-requisite for a GC shake-up.

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Even stepping outside myself and imagining the Tour through the eyes of a sunburnt American diletante, I think I still would have seen the inherent flaw in the way Versus and USA Today and even Bicycling Magazine tried to sell the 2010 Tour: what happens to “Lance vs. Contador” if either of them falls out of contention?

I’ve heard all the excuses—we have to sell papers. We’re building the audience. It’s what people want. I even got the press release about the record viewership in the first week. But as Lance shuffled meekly through the little door today with a torn jersey and shattered expectations, I think many purveyors of coverage in this sport will see exactly how poorly they’ve accomplished these things. You don’t develop someone’s taste for brie by deep-frying it.

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Pippo Pozzato gets a new nickname after today’s stage: Cassandra. He predicted the action pretty much to the letter (Evans winning, Sastre, Basso losing time) but was unable to do anything about it himself—possibly, some have suggested, because the weather was too grim. At any rate, the nickname is certainly inline with scope of the stage, which drew Gavia comparisons pretty much from the word go.

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So for those of you scoring at home, that’s two consecutive Grand Tour starts in the Netherlands, and two consecutive Grand Tours marked by huge crowds, active racing, and scenes of epic carnage in the early going.

If the pattern continues, this year’s TdF depart in Rotterdam might just be that rapturous moment in which casual cycling fans finally dissociate “flat” from “boring” in their appreciation of the sport—unless, of course, Lance Armstrong crashes or misses a split. Then they’ll howl about how it’s not fair.

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I’ll admit to being something of a Wiggins Skeptic. Not in the sense that he might be doping or cheating or anything like that, but in the sense that brilliant Tour performances from flatlanders tend to be one-off deals.

There’s no doubt he’s got a couple more Top 10 TdF rides in him, but seeing how deep he dug for 4th last year, and how easily Contador and Schleck distanced themselves on the big climbs made rumors of his off-season transfer fee an eyebrow-raiser for me.

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I never want to call Roubaix boring, but this year’s Hell of the North felt uncomfortably similar to a non-2003 Armstrong TdF win. That said, there’s plenty of action to run through, including but not limited to another fantastic Cancellara bike change, two dog incursions, a poorly-timed feed, and more arm flailing than one of those air-powered tube displays.

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

(Contains many photos to which I do not own the rights, and footage from Sport+.)

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The relationship between Tom Boonen and the E3 Prijs has got to be one of the most complex in cycling. The second-tier classic was one of the Belgian’s first major wins in his wunderkind days, and he had a literal lock on the event for four straight years.

But the past two editions have not been kind. Last year’s race ended with an uncharacteristic loss in a three-up sprint, and in this year’s race, Boonen was victimized by the combination of a brilliantly timed attack and a poorly negotiated bit of traffic furniture.

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Can radios be ruining cycling if the *real* Sprinters’ Classic goes to a rouleur for the second straight year? QuickStep shoulders the chasing load, while in the break, a Skil-Shimano rider sees too much soft-pedaling and makes the leap for freedom. But it’s all together with 8k to go as a very unlikely group threatens to force the selection.

[right-click for iTunes compatible download]

Also available on YouTube.

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The Elite Men’s World Championship Road Race in the words of the people who watched it live:

(click image for full size)

Source text from Cyclingnews’ live report, the final thread of Podium Cafe’s live discussion, and the first 50 results of a Twitter search for “Mendrisio” on 9/27/09. Cloud generated by Wordle with manual filtering by the author.

Tried to make it arc en ciel colors, but it just didn’t look as good as Team Embrocation (actually, it’s a default palette called “Blue Chill”). Probably could stand to slap together a real text scraper sometime to save time filtering out forum usernames, sigs and the like.

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“I’m sure I’ve been beaten by cheats before, I know I have, and I’m sure I’ll be beaten by cheats in the future.”
-Cadel Evans

As true as that quote may be to the the realities of cycling and the workmanlike attitude of its author, it is now—at long last and at least until Cadel Evans starts another bike race—false.

You can make a knock on the Aussie for occasionally head-butting photographers or getting difficult during poor neutral service changes. But in a race dominated recently by national superteams stacked with one-day specialists, to see a luckless Grand Tour rider—the first multi-day specialist champ since Abraham Olano in 1995—from savvy-but-outgunned Australia stick the audacious solo move in the closing kilometers was quite satisfying.

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