Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Tour Report; Stage 5- Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oy! Oy! OY!

The pocket rocket gave Boonen a great run today and beat the Belgian Basher to the line. McEwen was humble as ever- "I'm the man. I'm the fastest here". Mr Modesty was a little frustrated by his previous relegation, to say the least, and vindicated himself with a nice sprint, timed to perfection. Boonen stated before the stage today that his legs were a bit tired and he was a little worn down by the pressures of the Green jersey. Still, he launched his move at about 200M to go and came up a few too short with a hard-charging Robbie-the-Rocket on his heels. Big man Thor Hushovd picked up third and some valuable points for the Green jersey. Keep your eyes on the Norwegian national champion, as he could finish the Tour strong enough to wear green on the final podium in Paris.

My predictions of CSC attacking did not come true and now I wonder if Bjarne Riis even bothered to read my blog last night. I spelled it all out for him, so I don't know what went wrong today. Bjarne; go get'em! Show no mercy and put Voigt and Julich in the wind to get that yellow jersey back.

Lance made a nice gesture today by not starting the Tour in the Maillot Jaune, in a nod to the gutsy Dave Zabriskie and his untimely crash yesterday. Tour commissioner LeBlanc is alleged to have said "wear it or walk home" (I'm paraphrasing here people- I don't want any nasty emails). Still, I give LA a thumbs up for being a good guy on this. Showing some compassion in his final Tour is a good way to go out.

Tomorrow could be a good stage for Bjarne's boys to string things out with four categorized climbs. I still think that the race is in the hands of CSC right now and that they will have to ride hard to get a grip on things. Leaving it to the Disco Boys will only make things harder for CSC as the days go by. But hey, I'm an armchair Directeur with no Tour experience, so I should probably just have myself some frites and a nice Trappist Ale (like a Chimay) and sit in front of the TV.

Until later,

Tim

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bjarne 60% Riis is ill-suited to being the brains behind any organization. His most valuable asset was Sean TheMF Yates, now sadly in the employ of satan.
Yatesy thinks like we do anyway, but if he hadn't thought of something that you published in yedterday's blog, he would have taken it as solid gold.
liveyates
rowe