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.