Oh, man!

Zabriskie wiped out in sight of the finish, 1.5k from the end, and he is bloody! So he loses best tt i've ever seen, and instead of being tied with armstrong for first, he's down the standings.

Disco looks unstoppable.

Been following it HERE, all morning. Good for those who can't do streaming video.

T

Got a good video site for Zabriskie's fall?
Hmm. Usually Lance doesn't want the yellow so early, no?

According to the times posted, Lance wouldn't have gotten the yellow today; CSV was faster, until Zabriskie's fall.

T

velonews has updated text too...

for the past three years, the armstrong team has been content to take the yellow jersey in the first week if possible.

Answering my own question, OLN's site has good videos. Though it seems no one really captured Zabriskie's fall - the OLN video was from the rear, and all you saw was a guy in the middle on the line, all of a sudden on the ground. Read somewhere else he said his chain skipped

Ivan Basso was right behind DZ when it happened, and he said he didn't think it was due to the chain coming off, it just seemed like his front wheel washed out on him (according to IB's perspective)

I'm kinda not buying the whole chain story. Only time my chain ever skips off is when I'm dropping down from the big ring to the small one, and believe me, at the speeds those boys were travelling, nobody was downshifting into the small ring.
(hell, they were probably getting close to spinning out in the big ring)

It was a bummer for DZ, but I think it musta been caused in at least some part by pilot error.
Which is understandable, it's his first Tour, he's in the yellow jersey and wants to keep it, and he was going all-out for over an hour at that point.

What's amazing is that nobody else got taken down with him.


Oh, and to answer yer other question, I'm sure that Team Disco doesn't mind having LA in yellow so early. They just won't bother to defend it if any non-contenders go off the front between now and the mountain stages.

My personal gut belief is, that Lance wanted this Tour to be a statement race, and if he had had his way, he would have led from start to finish.
There are numerous records there to be broken; he narrowly missed to DZ for the fastest-ever TT, they won for fastest-ever TTT, and more to come.

I have to agree with Murph visavis the plans of armstrong. The disco team has too many people with too much stage race power for it to make any sense if they weren't intending domination on a scale unsuspected.

They have the last giro, tour and (i think, am i wrong?) tour of spain winners all on the team. Plus four top 10 finishers...

Yeah, it really was amazing no one else went down. Could'a swore I saw someone ride over DZ's (downed) wheel, but ...

You're right, about the chain story. What I read is that he was (going to) stand up to look back, but that doesn't jive with what i saw. Maybe a skip on the cassette?

Team Disco domination .... yep, lookin' like a plan.

Nice thing about living in Switzerland is the coverage of the tour on Eurosport is excellent. I’ve heard four theories why DZ fell. The chain slipping, touching the wheel of the bike in front of him, pulling out of the pedal and a police officer standing inside the barrier getting in the way. I haven’t seen or heard of DZ giving his own explanation. I can’t believe T-Mobile is supporting Ullrich. Is that just the team front and they are really riding for Vino. I’m starting to think Vino and Basso are the only 2 riders with a realistic chance of upsetting Lance. The mountains will tell in the coming days.

i just found out my parents had OLN so i invited myself to stay an extra 5 days..

anyone know a good bar or place in the brooklyn/nyc area?

anyone know a good bar or place in the brooklyn/nyc area?

I don't think there are any.

i don't think there are any...

did anybody see today's stage? what happened to tmob? wows again...

I just read the recap of today (Tuesday)'s stage. I think I'm going to have to see whose TV I can hijack tonight! Sounds explosive.

What a f'n awesome stage today, and I could only follow via internet updates.

Disco used their patented gameplan to perfection again today - ride as hard and as fast on the approaches as possible, shatter the peloton, then let Lance do what he does at the very end.

Impressive.

The preceeding days sandbagging (you could also call it a taper - pure genius) paid off in spades, as the entire Disco Blue Train was rocking it today.

Big props to Rasmussen (ex-MTB'er) and Valverde for very impressive rides.
Valverde can climb w/ Lance and then outsprint him - WOW. Hello next big cycling star.

Barring an off day or accident for Lance and Disco, I think we just saw the beginning (and middle) of the end for the other pre-race GC contenders/pretenders.

Tommorrow should be another great stage. Can't wait!!!

Great stage today watching Lance drop his rivals one by one. It seems I (and many others) was wrong about Vino. It wasn't much of a surprise that Valverde outsprinted Lance. The commentators on EUROSPORT were saying that would be the likely out come with 10 km to go. I think that is why Lance started the sprint with 500m to go, in an effort to get Valverde off his wheel. Didn't work, but good effort. Now to play devil's advocate. At Lances age, will he be able to recover to defend or attack on another big mountain stage tomorrow. If younger guys like rassmussen, Valverde and Vino recover better and attack him tomorow, it could make things interesting. I would not count Vino out. He may just have had a bad day. If that means he is fresher for the two HC climbs tomorrow, that could be trouble.

I think rasmussen and valverde will be there tommorrow and on the 15th, but I think that vino will lose some more minutes and then try to do a stage win. The only guy who can TT as well as lance on TMob is Ullrich, and i think they'll ride in support of him.

i think we'll see the postal train again tommorrow...which makes me wonder if they were screwing around on saturday. LA said in an interview that they hadn't ridden saturday's stage before and they got confused about where it ended...who knows, maybe they were sandbagging.

i ment a bar or place that would carry the tour de france.. like a sports bar of sorts.

The ticker at the bottom of the screen on OLN just mentioned something about tomorrow's stage being on the big screen in Times Square starting at 9 o'clock. It's not a bar so you'll have to bring your own beverage. Just don't get yourself a summons for an open container (I get to see all of those - we know who you are).