Tracking the Tour

TagFest: Tour

Today is the next-to-last stage in the second annual Tour of California. Last year they went right through my town and I didn't even know it! I was disappointed.

This year they again started in San Francisco and again American Levi Leipheimer won the Prologue. He's still in the Yellow Jersey (of tour leader) after winning the individual time trial in Solvang yesterday. Today they're down in Santa Barbara cycling through the hills and canyons. I'm listening to and watching the coverage online. The map shows a satellite image of the course and you can even track certain riders (little colored jerseys) on the map and on the course profile. It's awesome technology even if the audio does keep cutting out.

Right now there's a nine-man breakaway (the red car) ahead of the peloton (the blue car) by 3 minutes. Levi's yellow jersey is in danger so the Discovery team is working hard at the front of the peloton. They have to bring the breakaway back or (my favorite) Stuart O'Grady might be in yellow tonight. I'll update later.

ETA: The long run-in to the finish allowed the peloton to catch up and Levi and the rest of the Discovery boys finished with the pack. Stuey's teammate won the stage so his team, CSC, got some victory out of the day even though he didn't don the yellow. Tomorrow is a flat stage to the finish in Long Beach. We'll see if a breakaway can stay away and break Levi's heart.

Landis is God

Could you believe Floyd Landis this morning at the Tour? After yesterday's bonk and loss of 10 minutes and the yellow jersey, he took over the alpine stage today. On the first climb of the day his Phonak team launched him on a solo breakaway of over 120k. He was flying up those mountains and flying back down. Quite a sight to see. I was proud of him and his response to losing yesterday. He's only 30 seconds out of first with the all-important individual time trial on Saturday. Can he pull back that half-minute? We'll all be waiting on Saturday!

Best Tour on (Google) Earth

The other night while I was looking around for cycling and Tour de France news, I found a link to download the Tour route to Google Earth. It is so cool. It shows the climbs and sprints and feeding stations as well as the kilometer marks and waystation points along the way so you can follow along from town to town with the cyclists. It has a live function too but I have to admit that I haven't been getting up early enough for that. I'm just following along with Phil and Paul on my DVR.

I wish OLN would give us the town names more often though. I can't always see the physical landmarks well enough to figure out where they are. It seems, for the first couple stages anyway, that Google Earth doesn't have the highest resolution images in France. I was able to see really close yesterday only for a little while. In fact, the bridge they used to cross the Rhine into Germany from France wasn't built yet when the Google Earth images were taken. It looked, according to Google Earth, that they were riding right across the water!

Discovering the Tour

I thought I should read up on the Tour de France and recent cycling news tonight on the eve of the Prologue tomorrow in Strasbourg. I had to skim the "Operation Puerto" doping scandal articles. It's just too depressing that Jan, Basso and Vinokourov are out this year. We knew it wouldn't be Lance this year but surely it would've been one of them.

Anyway, I checked out my usual cycling websites for RSS feeds to add to my Safari lists and found that the Discovery team has been publishing video podcasts (they call them webisodes) for the last month and a half. So I downloaded them all into my iTunes. They sure are fun. All the behind the scenes stuff with the riders is really great. I wish they had closed captioning though. Some of their accents are kinda hard to understand. If you're a Discovery team fan, you should definitely check out these Race2Replace shows.

The Discovery guys have a good shot at some glory in the Tour now with the favorites and loads of others out of the race. I can't wait to get up early tomorrow to see what happens.

Tour de France Prep

The Tour starts on Saturday so it's time for me to start my own Tour preparation: getting up earlier. No more lounging around in bed until 8:00. OLN will be starting their coverage at 5:30 every morning which leaves me no time for sloth. I figure if I start tomorrow morning getting up a half hour earlier each day this week, I'll be ready for my 5:30 wake up call on Saturday. On the other hand, I could sleep in until 6:00 and fast-forward through the commercials. That may be a better plan. See? I'm slacking already.

Tour of California

I just discovered that the Tour of California bike race is going through my town today! Oh if only I would've stuck to my plan to stay home today. I guess I could go to San Jose tomorrow to watch the individual time trial. I can't believe I hadn't heard it was coming to town. I really must read up on my cycling news more often.