How about them Aussies in the Tour de France, the Mother Of All Bicycle Races. There are 6 of them and doing well... especially Baden Cooke (3rd in Stage 2) and Brad McGee (won stage 2); sprint experts Stuart O'Grady and Robbie McEwen are holding their own. Poor O'Grady was part of a two-man break-away today after 30 of 230 KMs.... only to be caught by the peloton with less than 1 KM from the Finish Line.... can you imagine 5 hours in the saddle and pedaling at speeds between 30 and 50 MPH.
But the American Team (sponsored by our "slow" Postal System) is doing extremely well. They won the Team Time Trial where all 9 riders covered the 70KMs ahead of other better rated teams. As of today (6 stages) the first 8 spots are occupied by the US Team. Note: of the 9 riders only 3 are actually Americans incl. of course Lance Armstrong, the Team Captain. plus 3 Spaniards and 1 Colombian, 1 Russian and one CZE. In fact the Colombian has been wearing the leader's jersey since the time trial, the first Colombian EVER to do so... Another American Tyler Hamilton is on the CSC team and may have his best tour this year as well.
Lance Armstrong has an excellent chance of winning his fifth tour which would put him up there with only a handful of "greats" to win that many tours in a row...
Noteworthy for us motorized-bike dudes, is that OLNTV is carrying all 22 days live every morning from about 7 to 9:30 (Central Time) and is repeated at least twice during the day. The coverage is phenomenal... with all the motorcycle-based cameras and helicopters, it is hard to miss anything of importance. May be some day OLN or SpeedVision will approach equivalent coverage of MX racing...
You can get the results from OLNTV's website:
www.olntv.com