I am loving the Tour de France (or Tour de Farce as some have christened it).
I know that a fair proportion of the field are doped to the eyeballs. I know. I just don’t care. It’s a 50 km/h game of chess played out mile after mile, day after day. And the “off-track” stuff make it by far the best soap opera on television right now. Cheats, scandals, accusations, heros, glorious victory, money, drugs. It has everything.
In case you’ve been living on another planet, or have tuned out, the basics are that with 4 days to go, Australia’s Cadel Evans sits in second place just under two minutes from leader Alberto Contador. Two of the pre-race favourites have been dumped from the tour in the past few days (including 10-day leader Michael Rasmussen) for doping infringements. That would never happen to Cadel because as we all know, all Australian sports people are squeaky clean – it’s only the foreigners who do performance enhancing drugs…!
Tonight and Thursday night’s stages won’t likely matter too much to the overall result (because the main contendors will all finish together in the “peloton” and the relative time gaps won’t change) and the final order will come down to Saturday night’s individual time trial – an individual race against the clock over more than 50km. Evans is very good at time trialling, Contador a little less so. Third placed Levi Leipheimer is also exceptional. It could go to any of the three of them…and we’ll know at about 2am Sunday morning.
I love the tour – dopes and all!