The Tour is getting better and better for the two US-based teams, Columbia and Garmin-Chipotle:
Dave Millar (Garmin) and Kim Kirchen (Columbia) tied for 2nd in the first individual time trial yesterday. They each had storming rides.
Mark Cavendish (Columbia) won today's stage, the longest stage of the Tour. Getting the stage win out of the way will take a huge burden off of Columbia, but I'm starting to think that they may be aiming higher than stage wins (with Kirchen).
So where it stands today, Columbia has 3 riders in the top-10 (Kirchen in second, Hincapie in 7th and Lovkvist in 8th) while Garmin has 2 in the top-10 (Millar in 3rd and Vandevelde in 6th). Lovkvist is leading the best young rider competition. Garmin is leading the team competition with Columbia in 2nd. One team or the other has been on the podium every day save the first (Kirchen on Stage 2, Frischkorn on Stage 3, Miller and Kirchen on Stage 4, Cavendish on Stage 5). LOTS of great publicity and return for the sponsors.
Overall thoughts:
I'm cautiously optimistic. Nobody has shown themselves to be a superman yet, and those riders who expend a huge effort on one day are hurting the next. One good example - of the 4 breakaway riders from Stage 3, the BEST placed rider in the Stage 4 ITT finished 141st (out of 178 riders). They were cooked from the day before. Another good example - Valverde, the early yellow jersey, doer of much early work and top contender for the overall lost over a minute on Stage 4. Yet a third, somewhat more murky example: On Stage 2 there were some serious headwinds and the announcers were repeatedly wondering why none of the teams was going to the front of the pack to drop the hammer and blow the race to bits. What I'm starting to think is that the directors sportif were not willing to take the chance and risk blowing up one or more riders on Stage 2 of the Tour knowing that they won't be able to "chemically recover" as they have in the past. Riders seem much more human this year (Cancellara on Stage 2, Valverde Stage 4) and "humaness" speaks well for "cleanliness".
We'll see.
The VS. coverage sucks (at least the primetime coverage). They could save themselves so much money by simply providing the straight video feed and commentary for the last 3 hours of every day. I'd be much happier with that as would (I'd bet) 95% of their audience because we are all avid cyclists. Casual viewers are not tuning into to VS. for this coverage. There is no story there for them.
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