This should be an interesting Tour. I think as the sport becomes less supercharged, the racing should be way more interesting. The riders themselves will need more rest days during the race itself, thus allowing the long breaks to succeed at a much higher percentage.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a RadioShack Team rider is going to win the race. Contador is obviously the safe pick, but that is no fun.

How about the local Midwest type riders wins a Elite Nationals last week, with Dave Wenger winning the Criterium Nationals and Jonathan Jacobs winning the Time Trial. It’s great to have the guys that we race thru out the season show case their abilities on such a national level. Congratulations guys.

Here’s a good interview with Danny Pate, who is riding the Tour for HTC. I applaud his thoughts on sticter bans for doping. Danny and I go way back to when he was a up and coming junior. Then later, we used to duke it out for the Iron Otter Award (Best Overall times riding both the MTB and Road stage races) at The Sea Otter Classic. When he came back for Sea Otter one year, when he was riding professional in Europe, I asked him why he is bothering racing MTB’s still. He said, “To be like you Steve.” That guy cracks me up.

The Tour of Lawrence starts tonight with street sprints in downtown Lawrence tonight. Tomorrow is a super hard circuit race and then a criterium on Sunday evening. I’m pretty iffy, but you never know. It’s a bike race and it’s not over until it’s over.

Okay, I need to glue some tires on and do the normal pre-race stuff. It is funny how you wake up with race mentality on a race day, even though I have no illusions of riding more than 200 meters this evening. Once.

The no needles policy that they started at the Giro this year is stupid. Bradley Wiggins thinks so too. I applaud the idea of the action, but implementing a rule that is unenforceable is like not having a rule to begin with.

If we want to put a stop to this whole thing, how about a rule that makes all the teams use the same doctors at the races like it was before. I’ve never been on a team that brought a doctor to a race, but I’ve seen lots of doctors at races, that were officially there on behave of the race.

The whole thing is like the no texting in automobile law that Kansas and many other states have passed. It has been shown in many studies, that accidents actually increase when this law is enforce. It doesn’t decrease texting, it increases accidents. People just put their phones lower, so they aren’t looking up nearly as often.

So, why it may seem like a great idea at the time, the rules/laws don’t actually do what they were intended to do. There still are IV bags and such at the Tour de France. Now they are just another aspect of the clandestine and covert part of the sport we’d all like to avoid.