Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2017 Giro d'Italia Stage 2

Introduction

Professional journalists can’t afford to burn any bridges by calling out a doper, an unstylish rider, or somebody who’s being a dick. They also have a responsibility to the public to provide fair, balanced reporting.  I have no bridges and no responsibility.  So read on for a totally biased blow-by-blow of Stage 2 of the Giro.

2017 Giro d’Italia Stage 2 – Olbia to Tortoli

As I join the action there are about 50 miles to go, with a breakaway of nobodies about three minutes ahead.  Today’s stage features three climbs and a bunch of other little lumps.  The last climb of the day, the Genna Silana, is a category 2, which gains about 2,900 feet and tops out at about 3,300 feet elevation.  But then there’s another 30 miles of descending,  so unless the breakaway blah, blah, blah, who cares.

The really interesting thing about this race is the return of Cadel Evans.  I guess retirement just didn’t sit well with him, so he’s back.  Now, he knows he’s long in the tooth and doesn’t want to tarnish his impressive reputation with poor riding, so he’s riding under the pseudonym Caleb Ewan.  Look, “Caleb,” you’re not fooling anybody.  But I do admire such pluck.  Far better to put in a mediocre ride in a great race than to be a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, readers, I’ll make you a deal:  if the breakaway’s gap goes back up during this climb, I’ll tell you who they are.  Other than that, it’s like temp workers at an office:  better not to learn their names, it just makes it sadder when they have to go.

So, to catch you up on the Giro so far, we’ve had two riders busted for doping already—actually, it was the night before the opening stage.  They were Stefano Pirazzi and Nicola Ruffoni of the Bardiani CSF team, popped for human growth hormone.  I’m naming theme here to help shame them.  Now, you may not have heard of this team.  They’re just a continental team racing here on a wildcard invitation, much like Danilo De Luca’s Vini Fantini team in 2013.  The difference with his doping that year (which earned him a lifetime ban) is that he should have known better, being a seasoned veteran.  With these continental teams, the riders are still learning the ropes and thus much more likely to screw up and test positive.  You get a guy like Team Sky’s Chris Froome, he’s a consummate professional.  He would never get caught.  So it’s kind of a Catch-22 for these up-and-coming riders on the little teams; they need to dope less, to stay out of trouble, and yet they need to beat these World Tour riders if they want to make the big time.  I imagine it’s kind of like being a new hire at Chucky Cheese: if you want to have the kind of energy you need to run birthday parties all day long, you’re going to need meth … and yet, if you haven’t gotten in good with the shift supervisor, he’s not going to look the other way.

It’s about 45 miles to go.  The breakaway is down to 1:26.  Here’s a fascinating historical tidbit, courtesy of Eurosport:  Jacques Anquetil won his first Giro stage in 1999, despite having died in 1987!  It’s certainly the case that ghosts have an amazing power-to-weight ratio.

So, who’s  riding this Giro?  We’ve got defending champion Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida); Domenico Pozzovivi (AG2R La Mondiale); Tejay van Garderen (BMC Racing); current maglia rosa Lukas Pöstlberger (Bora-Hansgrohe); Thibaut Pinot (FDJ); Nairo Quintana (Movistar); the ghost of Jacques Anquetil (albertnet-Carmex); Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb); Bauke Mollema (Trek-Segafrado); Peter Stetina (Trek-Segafredo); Pierre Roland (Cannondale Drapac); Joe Dombrowski (Cannondale Drapac); Alex Howes (Cannondale Drapac); and of course Cadel Evans, aka Caleb Ewan (Orica-Scott).

Okay, I just saw some footage of Evans/Ewan, and either he’s had some cosmetic surgery or I’m actually mistaken about this comeback thing.  Cut me some slack, it’s hard to keep up with my spotty Internet connection and these hit-or-miss free video feeds.

So here’s a brief recap of yesterday’s opening stage.  Pöstlberger was supposed to lead out a teammate at the sprint finish, but accidentally gapped the peloton and decided to solo.  And he actually pulled it off!  How is this possible?  I think it’s the badass umlaut in his name!

The breakaway, comprising five very thin nobodies in ugly uniforms, is on the category 2 Genna Silana.  They have about 39 miles to go, about 10 of them uphill.

So this is weird.  Manuele Boaro (Bahrain-Merida) had a problem with his rear derailleur, which was making his chain sag and flop around, so he took a spare bike from the team car.  But instead of just climbing on and riding off, he took the front wheel off his first bike and put it on the spare.  Why on earth would he do that?  Sentimental attachment to his front wheel?  Some kind of electronic gizmo attached to the wheel?  You can tell the pace is low or he wouldn’t take the time for a wheel swap.

In a shocking upset this season, the upstart team CCC Sprandi Polkowice was awarded the UCI official Ugliest Uniform award, toppling Team Sky who had been expected to dominate this category for years to come.

The breakaway is about 2/3 of the way up the climb and the guys are starting to attack one another.  This is a bit silly, because although their lead has gone up to 1:36, they’re going to need to work together on the descent to fend off the peloton.  I’m guessing that they were attacking Lukasz Owsian, the CCC rider, because they’re sick of looking at his orange outfit.  And sure enough, he’s dropped.  It’s a shame:  if he were able to get the pink jersey, or the KOM jersey, there would be one fewer hideous orange jersey in the race.

They keep showing Boaro, chasing the peloton after his mechanical.  Why?  I mean, who cares?  Either he makes it back on or he doesn’t.  He is irrelevant.  So is Owsian, who has now been caught by the peloton.  Good.  He deserves it for pairing that hideous team kit with orange shoes.  Surely he could have begged off, said he lost the team-issue shoes and could only find these basic black ones, and doesn’t want to switch out his shoes during a 3-week stage race.

The breakaway, now just four riders, has crested the Genna Silana but their gap is down to 36 seconds.  I guess without Owsian there to kindle their ire, they’ve just lost their passion for breaking away.

The peloton is totally loafing, riding gutter-to-gutter on the only big climb of the day.  It’ll come down to a sprint finish, with Andre Greipel (Lotto Soudal) a real favorite if and only if he can get comfortable on his bike.  He did a bike swap earlier, then was fussing with his shoe, and I really wonder what his problem is.

It’s now just three guys off the front.  One of the guys, Daniel Teklehaimanot (Dimension Data), is from Eritrea.  And he’s going for the KOM sprint!  I guess they weren’t at the summit after all!  And finally I understand what they were up to with that obviously doomed effort.  I guess I’m pretty rusty at watching bike races and making sense of them.

As you can see, I’m also pretty rusty at getting decent photos.  In my defense, Teklehaimanot was going really fast so the video camera was probably having trouble focusing.  Also, I fall behind on my reporting every time I have to type “Teklehaimanot.”

Anyway, the point I was going to make about Teklehaimanot, before he suddenly made that sweet attack for the KOM points, is that he’s one of the only, if not the only, black rider in this Giro.  I have just learned that he is only the third black Giro rider in history.  I don’t know why there aren’t more black road racers.  I’m quite sure Teklehaimanot will be the first black rider to wear the KOM jersey in the Giro.  (He is, in fact, the only black rider to ever wear the Tour de France KOM jersey.)

Wow, Eurosport just showed a top-5 highlight reel of “friction in the sprints,” which was pretty exciting.  Mark Renshaw’s famous head-butting was only #4.  The top three involved pushing and shoving that caused big crashes, and of course my wife happened to walk by at that moment.  (I guess it’s actually no coincidence because I was saying things like “holy shit!”)  Anyway, I’m torn.  On the one hand, it’s very rare for her to show any interest in this sport (she doesn’t even know what brand of bike I ride), but on the other hand I don’t need her seeing any more reminders that cycling is dangerous.

That paragraph you just read?  I know it has nothing to do with this Giro stage, but I have to keep writing or I’ll fall asleep at my desk.  This stage is so boring because the riders are loafing so badly.  Steephill.tv predicted that they’d finish at 8:14 a.m., which is in three minutes.  They would have to average 440 mph for the rest of this stage to finish on time.  I resent the riders for this, because my wife wants to go on a hike today and I’m holding up the show.  I just did some calculations and at this rate the average speed for this stage will be under 21 mph.  That’s pretty far off the highest average speed for a Giro, which was 24 mph, way back in 1983, long before EPO.  So these guys really have no excuse.

I just mentioned this average speed statistic to my wife, who said, “Maybe they’re clean!”  I was waiting for that expertly timed comic beat before she started laughing, but she didn’t.  I think she might have been serious.  As I said, she really doesn’t follow this sport.  So I’ve been trying to figure out a more plausible theory, and I think it’s that these racers are so young.  That is, they’re Millennials, and thus soft.  Perhaps they all got trophies in kiddie soccer just for participating.  It’s disgusting.  I remember when my older daughter got her first trophy:  she was like five, in soccer.  She was the most undistinguished soccer player you could imagine, just strolling along twenty feet behind the action.  She didn’t kick the ball a single time, all season, and then at the end she got a trophy.  Instead of being slightly embarrassed, she was on cloud nine about it.  She asked me, “How old were you when you got your first trophy, Daddy?”  I told her, “I was 15, but I had to earn it.  I had to win the race to get that trophy.  Nobody else got a trophy.  That’s just how it worked.  So don’t get too excited about getting a trophy for just showing up.”  If you think it’s harsh for a parent to un-praise his child like that, consider the alternative:  a bunch of whiny little bitches in Lycra averaging under 21 mph in a grand tour stage.

Okay.  I take that all back.  The pros are bigger badasses than I ever was, they don't whine, and if anything riding slow in an early Giro stage is old-school, not Millennial.  And my kid has come a long way since that participation trophy.  Click here for details (scroll to the very bottom).

Meanwhile, the scenery in this race is beautiful.  The riders just snaked through a narrow little road in a tiny town.  It wasn’t very dangerous though, because the riders are going so slow and all the spectators gave up and headed home long ago.  It’s about nine miles to go and still downhill.  It’s downhill with a tailwind so they’re finally starting to go pretty fast.

You know, maybe race leader Pöstlberger, nervous about his Bora-Hansgrohe team’s ability to defend the jersey, got his soigneur to slip roofies into the water cooler at the hotel.  Do you think WADA tests for Rohypnol?  I just checked.  They don’t test for it.  So this sluggish pace is finally explained!

If I seem excessively bitter about this slow pace, it’s because I’m using a 4G LTE cellular Internet connection, and the later it gets in the morning, the more people in my community are awake, and the more bandwidth congestion there is, so my Internet feed is slowing down and my screen keeps freezing.  I really should spring for cable, but I refuse to support Comcast or whatever name they’re hiding behind now.

It’s 7 km to go and some Katusha rider has had a flat tire.  They’re showing him trying to chase back on which means he must be a GC rider, because otherwise who would care if he caught back on?  I mean, it’s not like you could with the stage after such a chase.  It’s Ilnur Zakarin, who is indeed a GC hopeful (or perhaps a GC hopeless if his team can’t pace him back up). 

Now it’s 5km to go and the peloton is still gutter-to-gutter, nobody wanting to go hard on the front.  And my feed has stopped completely.  Dammit!

Okay, 2.6km to go and the peloton has finally lined out.  Still, in the back half of the pack the riders aren’t even in the drops.  Zakarin looks like he’s going to be able to latch onto the back, amazingly enough.  I guess the tailwind helped. 

So, it’ll be hard for me to follow this sprint because every single rider in the peloton is on a different team than last year, and half the teams have different sponsors, and most of the costumes have changed.  Okay, a rider is out of the saddle, the first time that’s happened since that KOM sprint!

“Lots of different riders in here,” the Eurosport announcers says helpfully.  Now my screen has gone black.  Do I dare hit Refresh?  Okay, my feed is back but the race is over.  I literally missed the finish, after watching this damn race for more than 2½ hours.  Maybe they’ll show a replay and I can pretend I’m still watching live.  What a travesty. 

Okay here it is!  They’re sprinting!  Somebody gets a mechanical!  Terrible timing!  And here comes Greipel up the side!  He’s a great big burly man and I think he’ll get the win!

Was that convincing?  Did it seem like it was really unfolding before my eyes?  Naw, didn’t think so.  Oh well.  What a boring stage.  Their final, official average speed was just 22.5 mph, despite having a fricking tailwind.  (Obviously my earlier calculation was pretty far off … I hadn’t accounted for the last 30 miles being downhill.)

Anyway, Greipel will take over the race lead.  I don’t even get to see the podium ceremony because the race ran over its projected time for so long, and my Internet feed has switched to soccer.  And you know what?  I’m suddenly aware of how ungrateful I’ve been … no matter how slow these bike racers go, it’ll never be as boring to watch as soccer.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2016 Milan-San Remo

  

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and extremely coarse humor.

Introduction

Any cycling aficionado will tell you that Milan-San Remo is the most boring one-day race on the entire World Tour calendar.  And you know what?  That’s an unfair thing to say, because actually some cycling aficionados will say it’s quite exciting.  This minority of fans is actually wrong, of course.  The fact is, MSR is a boring-ass race.  The course is too long, and too flat, and the only action that matters is on this tiny little climb toward the end that wouldn’t figure at all except that certain really fast sprinters almost couldn’t make it over a speed bump after almost 300 kilometers of racing.

Being boring, this is a perfect race to follow through my biased blow-by-blow report.  If I think a rider is doping, or ugly, or both, or too dependent on his race radio, I’ll say so.  And if I don’t even know for sure that they’re even using race radios, I’ll just guess.  And if the action gets too boring, I’ll share other tidbits such as riders’ beauty tips to make sure you’re entertained.

Biased Blow-By-Blow - Milan-San Remo 2016

The big news this year is the defending champion John Degenkolb (Giant-Alpecin) will not be lining up in Milan to defend his title.  Evidently he’d promised his wife he’d stain the deck this weekend, having totally forgotten about the race, and his wife put her foot down and wouldn’t let him weasel out of it.  She’s having her family out to visit next week and by god this has to be done, etc.  So the race is really up for grabs now.

As I join the action, there are 78 kilometers left to race.  There’s a breakaway of nobodies 3:39 up the road, and some of them are pretty funny-looking.  One of them has the goofy superhero sunglasses and the Euro-trash mullet.  You can see him at the far left in this photo.  Also note the leader’s ridiculous handlebars.  These nobodies always look a little off to me.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how things pan out,” declares the anonymous Eurosport commentator uselessly.  Has this ever not been true for any bike race, or any sporting event?  I’m going to have to play the devil’s advocate here and tell you:  it’s going to be really boring seeing how things pan out.  Or, conversely, it will be really interesting to walk away from my PC at the end and not see how it pans out.

The peloton is in the feed zone, grabbing musette bags while riding by at like 30 mph.  Pretty impressive.  Little known fact:  almost 40% of English-speaking World Tour riders still call musette bags “horsey bags.”  Apparently that’s what Lance Armstrong called them, and riders either mimicked him out of respect, or because they were scared not to.  Following Lance’s doping scandal, it’s believed that at least half of the riders still saying “horsey bag” are doing it ironically.

The commentator just used the phrase “uphill sections of the climb.”  Where do they find these guys?

It’s 61.3 kilometers to go.  To catch you up on what’s happened since the starting gun went off:  everybody started pedaling, at a “ferocious tempo” according to the Eurosport guy.  Eleven riders broke away.  Their lead has fluctuated between zero and five minutes.  Everybody has been pedaling most of the time.  There is very little coasting.  No rider has gotten lost.  The weather is fair.

With 56.8 kilometers to go, some riders crash!

Nobody slid under barbed wire fence or anything dramatic.  One guy looks like he may have scuffed his shoe.  I’ve definitely seen more interesting crashes, such as this one.

Look at how that wheel collapsed!  Pretty sad that I have to go back to the 2010 Tour de Suisse for an example of a fascinating crash.  On the plus side, look at the damage to this wheel from the crash that just happened:

“It does suit a rider who can ride well,” the announcer says of the finishing stretch of this race.  Is that what passes for insight these days?  I sure hope this is just the B-team, and that we’ll get the good announcers for the last few dozen kilometers.

How come kilograms got to be shortened to kilos?  Who decided that mass is more important than linear measure?  I’d love to type “kilos” instead of “kilometers” but I’d confuse my readers.  It’s so damned unfair.

With 48.5 kilometers to go, the lead is down to 1:38, so it’s like this breakaway never happened.  Maybe one or two of these guys will tell his grandkids, “I was in a breakaway in Milan-San Remo once.  We got caught.”  To which the sniveling little grandkid will reply, “Dammit Grandpa, stop living in the past!”

I interviewed race favorite Peter Sagan (Tinkoff Team) earlier this morning.  He said he didn’t care about the win—he just wants to make the podium so he can show the world how well-behaved he can be this time.  He was referring, of course, to his infamous misstep when he squeezed a podium girl’s tush after the 2013 Tour of Flanders.  I’d always wondered how he expected people to react.  Did he figure the commentators would say something favorable?  “Ah, and there’s Sagan, the perfect gentleman, giving the podium girl a little affection.  A less refined racer would be grabbing handfuls of ass right now.”  I asked Sagan what he was thinking, if anything, when he did that.  “Well, actually, I meant the gesture as a social commentary,” he replied coolly.  “I’ve always been bothered by the barbaric practice of having young models kiss sweaty racers after the race, and I thought by tweaking this retrograde tradition just slightly, I could highlight the absurdity of it and put the sexism issue into starker relief.  And actually, I arranged the whole thing with the podium woman beforehand, so she wouldn’t be surprised.  She’d totally agreed to it and then changed her mind later and acted hurt.  I don’t know what her deal was … probably she was on the rag.  Oh no … did I just say that out loud?”

Sagan is an interesting racer.  On the one hand, he can do a no-handed wheelie while climbing a Huis-Categorie grade, and can ride right up onto the roof of his car.  On the other hand, he looks like the guy on the cover of a romance novel, and has the intellect of a baitfish.

There’s another crash! 

I thought that by employing the exclamation point I could get you excited about the crash.  But it wasn’t that exciting, actually.  If these guys were required to ride with nitroglycerin or some other highly unstable substance in their jersey pockets, such that they actually exploded upon impact, I think you’d see a lot fewer crashes, but they’d be really exciting ones.  The only significant news from this crash is that Geraint Thomas (Team Sky) was involved.  That might cost him the race, if he’s hurt.

In looks like Michael Matthews (Orica-GreenEdge) was also caught up in the crash, as he’s furiously chasing the peloton now.  Matthews won two stages at Paris-Nice recently, so he must fancy his chances here today.  Of course, he probably wouldn’t say “fancy” like I just did.  That’s not a very common word, even though it can be used as an adjective (e.g., fancy pants), a verb (e.g., fancy his chances), or a noun (e.g., Cat Fancy magazine).

There are 26 kilometers left and the breakaway has just 15 seconds.  I wonder which chaser will be the first to say, “Okay, guys, the fun and games are over!”  Man, I’d like to be that rider.

I had a brief chat this morning with outside favorite Fernando Gaviria (Etixx-Quick-Step).  Though only 21 years old, and riding in his first MSR, he’s being supported by teammate Tom Boonen, who has decided he no longer enjoys training and will use his huge talent to be an out-of-shape domestique from now on.  Gaviria was nervous before the start.  “My mom’s gonna kill me,” he said.  “I put my retainer under my napkin at dinner last night and must have forgotten about it.  That’s the third one I’ve lost!”  Gaviria is the only rider in this race who is undergoing orthodontia, but a lot of these riders still live with their parents.

With 23 km to go, the peloton is all back together—but somebody attacks!  It’s Giovanni Visconti (Movistar Team) and Ian Stannard (Team Sky) and they quickly open up a nice gap. 

Pretty good move, actually, because there’s a pretty twisty descent and they’ve quickly increased their lead from 12 seconds to 23.  Man, they’re just flying!

Stannard has accidentally dropped Visconti but I’m sure they’ll be back together soon.  Could they hold off the field for 18 kilometers?  Of course not, but they’re surely hoping other great riders will bridge up.  Fabian Cancellara (Trek-Segafredo) would be just the rider to do that, because he’s plenty strong but of course couldn’t win a field sprint because he’s older than George Burns.

Three more riders have joined the lead duo.  They’re about 7 km from the Poggio, which passes for a climb after so many hours in the saddle.  The lead is down to 15 seconds with Katusha and BMC leading the chase, and Etixx-Quick-Step starting to get their guys in position.  I have to predict an Etixx-Quick-Step victory because two of the widely touted favorites are on this team (Gaviria along with Zdeněk Štybar), and it can’t hurt having Boonen helping.

With 2 km until the Poggio, the group is suddenly caught.  I never even got those other three guys’ names.

It’s under 10 km to go and Greg Avermaet (Team BMC) is on the front drilling it, as he is wont to do.  Michael Matthews has reconnected to the peloton but is dying on the back.

“It’s all about going as hard as you can,” says the practically brain-dead commentator.

Alexander Kristoff (Team Katusha) is well placed.  Obviously he’s a favorite.  His boys are collected at the front along with a bunch of BMC guys.  The pace doesn’t actually look that high … the group is pretty much gutter-to-gutter whereas if the hammer had gone down, it’d be a narrow line.

Some dude is attacking!  It’s Filippo Pozzato (Southeast-Venezuela) according to the graphics, but the announcer says, “No, it’s not, it’s number 180.”  There is no number 180 in this race, according to the cyclingnews start list.  So I have no idea who this guy is.  Fortunately, he’s caught and dropped.

Kristoff attacks, followed by Michal Kwiatkoski (Team Sky)!  This could be a really good move!  He’s first over the Poggio!  And now Vincenzo Nibali (Astana Team) is going after him!  What, are you kidding?!  We got us a bike race here!

With 5 km to go, Kwiatkoski has a handful of seconds, but Nibali and Cancellara are closing fast!  But as the road goes up with about 4 km to go, the gap is going back up!  Nibali goes for it up the left of the road, just flying!  With 3.2 km, Kwiatkoski has 4 seconds and still looks great! 

Right on schedule, my feed freezes!  My wife is running the microwave and it’s jamming the WiFi!  I’m doomed!

Whew, I got my wife to delay her breakfast and now my picture is back.  With 1.8 km to go, Etixx-Quick-Step is drilling it on the front and 5 seconds isn’t much anymore.  Cancellara is on the warpath now, and Edvald Boassan Hagen (Dimension Data) flies off up the right side, joined by Van Avermaet with 1 km to go!  Boassan Hagen is killing it on the front with 500 meters to go!  Cancellara isn’t far back!  Now they’re looking at each other, and a dude stacks!  But somehow, not a single rider is taken down with him!  DAAAAAMN!

The road is slightly uphill and the sprint is well underway!  Wow, it’s some random FDJ guy on the front!

And the race goes to Arnaud Démare, a Frenchman! 

A Frenchman hasn’t won this in like twenty years!  The dude is totally stoked and as he is mobbed by his teammates, he’s whooping like an American, like a cracker from the deep South no less!  What a win!  What a race!

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2015 Tour de France Stage 9 TTT

Introduction

What do you suppose goes through the minds of race announcers, that they’re not allowed to say? Maybe things like, “That guy’s obviously coked to the gills,” or “So-and-o looks like a damn clown.”  Sure, announcers hint at stuff:  “Froome has injected some, uh, life into this race,” or “Not the most elegant rider, surely, but he gets the job done.”  And why can’t they be perfectly candid?  Because they’re professionals.  I, on the other hand, am not.  So I’ll say it how it is, or at least how it looks to me.  And if I’m a little on the cynical side, can you blame me?

I know you think team time trials are boring, so I’m going to work really hard as I go along to make this as entertaining as possible.  And you should read anyway, because this is an important Tour stage.  The Tour hasn’t had so little time trialing since 1933, and this year’s only individual TT already happened, without breaking up the GC all that much.

I’m missing a Mount Diablo ride with my pals for this, BTW.  One of them really egged me on, e-mailing me last night to say, “Dana, thanks for writing the TTT preview!  Now that you fulfilled your blogging obligations to your mom, you can meet us....”  He has an impressively firm grip on how elite my blog readership is.  Today you can see how I did with the predictions I made, about the outcome of this race and its affect on the GC battle....

2015 Tour de France Stage 9:  Vannes – Plumelec TTT

As I join the action, FDJ is hammering along and the Eurosport announcer (I never learn their names, as it’s too sad when they leave, which at least they tend to do before getting too old to think straight) has just said, “So-and-so is out with a broken neck.  It’s actually broken in two places, and he’s lucky to have escaped serious injury.”  WTF??!! Is this guy joking?  Who jokes about a broken neck?  Or does he somehow consider this minor?

And just like that, we’re on to some ads.  I’m joining the action late here, so I hope I haven’t missed any important teams.  I had a bit of a glitch this morning because my Internet connection is down.  Fortunately, all bloggers have dueling Internet connections.  It’s just part of the value we bring you readers, for free.

Here’s my favorite current ad.  ANNOUNCER:  “Marcel Kittel, do you use this shampoo because Alpecin is your new team sponsor now?” KITTEL:  “No not at all, I just like the feeling of thick hair.”  I’ve seen this ad several times this week and I still can’t believe I’m hearing it right. I mean, I’ll grant that it’s theoretically possible to absorb caffeine through your scalp.  Dumb idea, but okay, possible.  But “the feeling of thick hair”?  Look, nameless ad agency, hair doesn’t have nerves, and if it did, it’d be one nerve ending per shaft ... how could you sense thickness? 

The Lotto Soudal team has started their TTT.  As I mentioned in my preview yesterday, these Lotto guys are (by bike racer standards) simply huge, with the highest numbers I saw for height, weight, and body mass index.  If this TTT were, say, 3K in length, I’d pick them as favorites.

Sean Kelly, the evergreen Eurosport announcer, says that these teams warm up for 40 km before a race like this.  Man, that’s a lot.

IAM Cycling is on the line.  I don’t know what product or service IAM produces, so I just consider this the “dog food team.”  I could look it up, but I’m too busy.

Lotto Soudal looks pretty cohesive.  All their guys have great position on the bike, which is more than I can say about some GC contenders (okay, one GC contender, and I won’t bag on him by giving his name, though his initials are CF and he’s on Sky).

Poor Orica GreenEdge.  They won the last long Tour TTT, two years ago, but they have only six riders left in this crash-ridden Tour, and they obviously went in to this one with the sole goal of making the time cut (kind of like choosing a class in junior high because you heard it was an easy “C”).  Orica GreenEdge look like they’re on a training ride.  Check it out, one guy didn’t even fasten his helmet strap!

Weird.  I’ve restored my better Internet connection and refreshed, and now the announcer is a woman!  I’ve never encountered that before.   Maybe she watched “In A World...” and got inspired.  She’s interviewing some dude with an Irish accent, Brian Smith.  I can’t tell his role because my video is too grainy.

Ah, we’re back to the main announcers.  I guess they had a special guest star asking the questions (since all that requires is a script and a good voice, and she had both, and I miss her already).

Lampre Merida finish their ride, in around 33 minutes.  I was slurping coffee and missed exactly what Kelly mumbled about their result, but I think these guys are now leading.

Another ad!  There’s this highlights reel of all the sports that Eurosport carries, and the announcers just about pissing themselves with excitement (e.g., “He didn’t just break his world record, he absolutely SHATTERED it!!!”) and then, incongruously, they show a snippet of same-sex diving, with the announcer totally quiet.  What?  You haven’t heard of same-sex diving?  Maybe that’s not the official name.  Synchronized diving?  Yeah, that’s probably it.

Bora-Aragon has launched their offensive.  Okay, I know that’s a bombastic way to say “started their TTT,” but there are a lot of teams here and I don’t want you to think this was a computer-generated sports story.  (That’s a thing now, believe it or not.)  I promise I won’t use the word “gallop” at any point during this blow-by-blow.

IAM Cycling is going really fast, getting the best intermediate split.  And now Trek Factory Racing is on the start ramp.  The camera pans across them and man, one of their dudes is really small.  It’s almost comical.  They should have arranged them in order from tallest to shortest like at a wedding, to look less jarring.  And lose the bridesmaid dresses, guys!  Poor Trek.  Earlier in the Tour they lost their best guy, Fabian Cancellara, who was the first of two race leaders to crash out this year.  Unlike Orica GreenEdge, these guys can’t afford to loaf, because they have a GC rider, Bauke Mollema, to support.

Team Europcar doesn’t look fast at all.  They’re bunched up like a peloton instead of strung out in a line.  Thomas Voeckler is attacking!  He just never learns.  Remember when everybody used to love him?  You can thank Lance Armstrong for that.  I know, Lance lied, he cheated, he was a dick, but at least he gave the French their underdog for awhile there.  Look for the silver linings, people.

Astana is on the road.  They had a great TTT in the Dauphiné.  They also looked unbelievably good in the Giro.  I really mean “unbelievably,” as in I don’t believe it.  They reminded me of US Postal.  On final climbs Astana would have like four guys in a lead group of ten or fewer.  Oddly, though, they kept attacking their GC rider, Fabian Aru.  Since we’re into another ad (which is also unbelievable) I’ll take a moment to describe Astana’s latest optimization efforts.  Their tactics were so sloppy in the Giro, not only confounding Aru but surely demoralizing him, they’ve decided to tweak their world-class doping program yet again.  You read that right:  doping for the mind.  Their directeur sportif, Giuseppe Martinelli, was apparently having trouble concentrating and is now on Adderall.  Not to be outdone, the team’s general manager, Alexandre Vinokourov, always an impulsive type (but hailing from the good old days when hunches and gut feelings hadn’t yet been totally obliterated by race radios), is testing a new drug, LogiContin.  And both of them are also experimenting with Alpecin-SC, a new caffeinated leave-in conditioner.

IAM Cycling has the best time at the second intermediate check, by a larger margin than before.  They look pretty awesome, if you can ignore the visors built into their helmets.  They’re not the kind of visor that sticks out to form an awning, but more like what welders use.  Is there a name for that?  Speaking of which, I was out riding up the Huis Categorie Mount Diablo with my teenage daughter last weekend, and there was a woman up there with one of these dorky TT helmets (and aero bars).  She instinctively started giving my daughter advice, as though her old man obviously couldn’t.  I like that about riding with my kid.  Nobody ever gives me advice.

Oh dear.  Astana’s mental doping is clearly not working!  Their TTT line has completely disintegrated!  They’ve lost like four guys on this first climb and are trying to regroup.  Only two riders have made it back up.  One of the two who can’t reconnect is gesticulating wildly to the guy behind him.  And now he swats himself on the butt!  It’s so sad ... I almost can’t bear to watch.

IAM Cycling now has the best time, ten seconds faster than Lampre-Merida.  We’ll see how long that lasts.

Team LottoNL-Jumbo is on the road, and so far so good.  The “J” in “Jumbo” is that special Dutch kind, so it’s pronounced “Gumbo.”  No it isn’t.  Just seeing if you’re awake.  Of course it’s actually “Yumbo.” 

Okay, I’m back.  Watching Astana’s troubles had a serious impact on me—as in, my bowels thought it was race day for me.  You might find this TTT boring, but that’s my fault.  This can be a very exciting event for anybody who’s had to suffer through a crucial TTT himself and can relate.  I think this is very likely the most painful event in cycling.  Why?  Well, first off, TTTs tend to be pretty short, so the effort is far more intense than with the patient pacing you need for a really long mountain stage.  Yes, the individual time trial is often of similar length, but if you loaf in an ITT, you don’t screw over your team.  In a TTT, you have to be awesome the whole time or you blatantly ruin everything for your comrades.  It’s kind of like ballet, where if a dancer breaks her ankle during a performance she has to keep right on dancing.  (If you think it’s silly to hold ballet dancers up as the ideal, think again:  they have the highest pain threshold ofanybody.)  I’ve always sucked at ITTs because I knew there was no real consequence of failing to ride hard enough.  I was lazy.  But in TTTs I was driven by the fear of shame, and dug deeper than in any other event. 

Think about it:  if you’re in a hill climb and get too miserable, you can back off and watch the others ride away from you and feel like you’re giving them a gift!  “I suck, so you get to win ... enjoy it.”  But imagine being in the collegiate national championship TTT as one of the favorites, and failing to deliver.  Forever after you wouldn’t be able to look at your teammates for fear they’re thinking, “We could have won if you didn’t screw it up!”  I found myself in that position in 1990, and was so miserable during that TTT, I seriously fantasized about killing myself.  I thought, if I ride full-speed into that post, will I die?  That would end the pain and I wouldn’t have to face my pals!  It was too risky, though ... what if I lived?  So I pushed on.  Yesterday I was boring my wife with this story, when suddenly she became interested. “Wow, you’re moved by this!” she said.  “Are you crying?”  I wasn’t, but I was very close.  And this was 25 years later.  TTTs are a bitch.

Oh my god.  Astana is down to five riders.  They’re in the final kilometer.  They really don’t look good.  They look really deflated, I mean physically.  Their fifth guy is so fried he’s on the wrong side of the road, not even getting a draft.  That’s surely the sign of mental collapse.  Sometimes that’s okay, though, as it means you left absolutely everything on the road.  If you finish too fast, that can mean you didn’t exhaust yourself properly. 

And how about that!  Astana has managed somehow to take the lead.  Of course, the best teams are still to come, but still, I guess they couldn’t have gone that slowly.  Poor Nibali.  His Tour isn’t going well, and I’m sure he hoped to validate his victory last year so people wouldn’t just say, “Yeah, you won, but Contador, Quintana, and Froome weren’t there.”

AG2R La Mondiale is on the road.  They look kind of climber-y to me.  Not so good for TTTs.

Eurosport is interviewing Michele Scarpone, who has so little hair left, he could make a bottle of Alpecin last for like a year.  He should use their special Espresso version.  He says nothing of any interest, predictably enough.  I’d quote him if he said something like, “Yes, I visited Dr. Ferrari, but not for drugs, or even for training advice.  You see, we’re lovers.”  Actually, let’s pretend he did say that.

Tinkoff-Saxo is down the start ramp and hammering along.  This is one of the really important teams, because a) their GC guy, Alberto Contador, is obviously a favorite, and b) if they have an outstanding ride today, they could put Peter Sagan in the yellow jersey, which would be amazing because he’d then be holding the green, white, and yellow jerseys simultaneously. 

Movistar is having a good ride and some have tapped them as favorites for this TTT.  Naturally their motivation is super high, with GC favorite Nairo Quintana in their ranks.  They look pretty good out there, if you can get past their boring uniforms.

Oh dear!  The Movistar line has broken!  You know, I’m going to blame the radios for this.  After all, the directeur sportif can’t give a continuous patter about whether everybody is together, and so many riders have forgotten how to use their spidey-sense to know what’s going on.

BMC are on the start ramp!  No pressure, guys.  Man, I hope they light it up out there.  An American in yellow, without all the asterisks of doping, would be fricking awesome.  I wouldn’t expect him to hold it for too long, if he got it, but how awesome would it be to bring home a stuffed lion for your kid?

Movistar has the fastest intermediate split, notwithstanding their troubles a bit ago.  But they’ve taken the lead over from a team with only five guys left ... their placing may yet tumble.

Now Eurosport is interviewing Juan Antonio Flecha about the weather.  “The wind is blowing, as wind often does, and though it was blowing also earlier today, it may not be blowing is much as it was, though it could be blowing harder now, and there was wind when Astana was riding, like there is now, and wind can be a factor in a TTT when a team can be slowed by wind, unless it’s a tailwind, which would tend to blow you forward and actually speed you along.  Also, I myself am a windbag, and I’ve been breaking wind this entire time, by which I mean I have been releasing gas from my anus.”  Flecha’s chatter is the verbal equivalent of a college kid using a really big font and wide margins to make the five-page minimum with his essay.  Might I recommend a Bora kitchen ventilation system for this fellow?  I’m reminded repeatedly during this coverage of how well Bora handles “vapors that smell bad.”  They’re insulting your cooking!  Great ad copy, that.

Okay, they’re showing Sky now, and Froome with his ugly helmet.  The commentator is going on about how Froome’s handlebars were created using a 3D printer.  I know, this dude’s just making shit up, right?  Froomie’s helmet is of a piece with the rest of his ghastly gaunt ungainly look.  It completes the insect look.

BMC has the fastest intermediate split, but only by two seconds over Movistar.  I’m not sure that heralds an awesome ride but of course it’s hard to predict these things.

Saxo-Tinkoff isn’t looking all that tight.

But then neither is BMC, actually.  Couple gaps there between riders.  I guess you can’t tell from this photo, but one rider is sitting on the back, unable to move up through the line.  At least he’s communicating well to the others about it.

See that thingy sticking out from the last dude’s saddle?  That’s a GPS device, to make all the split times more precise.  Every racer has one for every stage, just to further remove guesswork from the armchair generals’ over-precise operations.  It’s also how they can put up that little speedometer graphic you see in the photo there.  I’d like to see the big data from Stage 4, when Tony Martin overcame a mechanical problem and soloed to victory on his teammate’s bike.

Team BMC has the fastest split now with Sky through the first intermediate check, but it’s by a fraction of a second! 

Weird ... Tinkoff-Saxo has only seven guys in their group.  I thought they had nine going in ... maybe not, or maybe they accidently shelled a couple dudes.

I have to say, Sky looks pretty good.  All nicely lined out, no gaps, and totally aero.

BMC is at the second intermediate point and now leads Movistar by 3 seconds.  That’s not a ton, considering Movistar isn’t the team they’re most worried about.  I’m thinking mainly about a yellow jersey for Tejay, of course; even a 30-second deficit wouldn’t hurt Sky too much since Froomie, when he’s properly lubed (i.e., on any day of the season), can take that kind of time in just a few kilometers on the right mountain ... and there are so many brutal mountains ahead.

Tinkoff-Saxo are looking okay, other than their uniforms, which are so bizarre ... they’re made to look like they’re spattered with mud, evidently.  I just don’t get that.

Uh oh ... BMC is somehow down to six riders.  Maybe it’s according to plan; maybe they’ve figured out that certain guys will slow them down on the climbs or something.

Sky are through the second intermediate check, and they’ve got the virtual lead by one second over BMC!

Tinkoff-Saxo are over the line and have lost about 25 seconds for Contador.  Not great, but not a complete disaster.  The bigger issue for Contador is if he tired himself out too much in the Giro.  I’m surprised he even raced it, frankly.

BMC has gapped their sixth rider!  Okay, he’s back up ... they’re going so fast, the slipstream must be really long.  They’re on the penultimate climb and riding cohesively.  But what’s this?  They’re actually down to five guys, and Sky down to six.  I think it’s because we’re 8 days into this race that teams are breaking up so much.  A TTT earlier in the Tour probably wouldn’t feature so many breakdowns.

BMC are now on the finishing climb and they’re clearly suffering.  Out of the saddle now, going for the line!  They’re trembling all over, so the camera can’t properly focus on them.  (No they aren’t.)

They’ve got the fastest provisional time, but I have a feeling Sky could win this.  No yellow for Tejay in any case, as I pessimistically predicted.  You never know, though ... maybe Sky will fall apart, like they did in the Dauphiné.

Sky has 1 km to go.  They’ve got two minutes to get to the finish, which might be tricky only because of the finishing climb.  Geraint Thomas is hammering on the front and has been for a fair bit now.  Now Froome takes it up.  Nicolas Roche is dying on the back of the line.  They’re having to regroup a bit here and Roche is back on.  Froome is out of the saddle, looking like Ichabod Crane.

Check it out!  BMC has managed to win this thing!  Sky got second, by one second!  Both teams beat Tinkoff-Saxo, also as I predicted.  Also, Tejay has moved from third into second on the GC, also as I predicted.  As it turns out, all of my predictions were spot-on.  How do you like that, Mom?

Biased Blow-By-Blow, Vuelta a España 2014, Stage 20

Introduction

I know nobody follows the Vuelta a España.  It’s not nearly as prestigious as the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, and it comes during football season when even the most diehard cycling fan is glued to ... wait, what am I saying?  It’s impossible to be both a cycling and football fan.

Anyway, since you can’t be bothered to wake up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday (except to ride), and no major cable network carries this virtually unknown race, I’m doing you the service of fighting with messy Internet feeds to get some live coverage so I can give you a blow-by-report that differs from, say, the cyclingnews one in a couple of major ways.  First of all, I get into much more detail about what the racers are thinking, where they get their hair done, etc.  Two, I spell everything correctly.  Three, I don’t have to bite my tongue when (right or wrong) I don’t like something a rider is doing (e.g., doping, being inelegant, having a funny name) and so I pretty much tell the whole story.  The real story.  The as-I-see-it story.  Sometimes an unrelated story here or there.  So here you go.

Stage 20 – 2014 Vuelta a España

It’s a great stage today.  Arguably the hardest of the whole Vuelta, with certainly the most brutal mountaintop finish.  Here’s the profile.

My Internet feed absolutely sucks.  It’s going about as fast as Cadel Evans in this Vuelta.  It’s more of a slide show, really.

As I join the action, the riders have got 47 km to go.  There’s a breakaway of four guys:  Wout Poels (Omega Pharma-Quick Step), Maxime Mederel (Team Europcar), Przemyslaw Niemiec (Lampre-Merida), and Jerome Coppel (Cofidis).  Wout’s manager is surely yelling “Wout, Wout, Wout!” through the radio.  Przemyslaw’s manager just calls him “Slaw,” and in fact nobody on the team can pronounce this guy’s name.  His parents can’t even pronounce it.  It doesn’t matter, though, because none of these names will become a household word because the gap is down to under five minutes and there are still two huge climbs to come:  the Category 1 Alto de Folgueiras de Aigas (Climb of the Folgers Crystals) and the Beyond Category Puerto de Ancares (Port of Apathy).

I’m on some Spanish site.  I knew I should have studied that language!  There’s a chat window alongside the video feed and the astute comments I see are “Vai!!! Vai!!! Vai!!! Froome!!! :-)” and “aru!!!”  So it’s nice to see Americans don’t have a monopoly on lameness when it comes to the amateur pundit game.

My online correspondent is having no luck with his Internet feed either.  Maybe the hacking group, Anonymous, is behind this:  shutting down certain video streaming websites to protest the jocks that used to pick on them in junior high gym class.

So, while I’m waiting for Eurosport announcer (and former champion) Sean Kelly to finish the sentence he started 30 seconds ago (before my feed froze again), here’s what’s happened so far in this Vuelta (since I know you haven’t been paying any attention because it’s only the Vuelta).  The Colombian favorites are out (Rigoberto Uran Uran and Nairo Quintana).  Quintana crashed in the time trial while leading the race, which is a shame.  And Uran Uran is too young to understand why older guys call him “Duran Duran,” which is also a shame.  Plus he got sick and dropped out. 

It’s 27 km to go and I’ve missed most of the last 20 km but I have a solid feed now.  The gap from the break to the peloton is down to 1:25.  The leaders are still on the penultimate climb.

So back to the recap:  the American hopeful, Andrew Talansky (Garmin Sharp) is way down in 56th place.  My favorite rider, Cadel Evans, is doing scarcely better, in 46th.  The defending champion, Chris Horner, didn’t get to start the race because his team decided he was just too damn old and with these new “elder abuse” laws on the books, they couldn’t afford to take the risk.  Well, I guess that’s not exactly what’s going on.  They decided his cortisol levels were too low so he wasn’t healthy enough to ride.  This is in keeping with the MPCC (Mouvement Pour un Cyclisme Credible) which Horner’s team, Lampre-Merida, is voluntarily participating in.  Team Sky, meanwhile, doesn’t participate in MPCC because, according to their spokesman, “We don’t need to be a part of that program because we asked our guys if they doped and they clearly said no, and they would never lie.”

Speaking of Team Sky, I see that their domestique Vasil Karienka (who is wearing “the horse face” according to Kelly, whatever that means) is at the front of the Sky train hammering the pace at the front as they’ve been doing all day and for the last few weeks.

So, getting back to the status of the race overall.  Alberto Contador (Tinkoff-Saxo) is leading the GC by 1:19 over Chris Froome (Team Sky).  Froomie had a lousy time trial, which puts his pharmacist in a really tough spot, but Froomie has lately been riding better so he might well try something on the brutal Puerto de Ancares, which is 13 km (8 miles) at 8.7%, with pitches of 18%.

Contador crests the final summit of the sawblade Alto de Folgueiras de Aigas in first place, perhaps to send Froome a message but more likely because his mom is watching the stage today but will miss the finish due to a hair appointment.

So, this stage may be the final battle of this Vuelta because tomorrow’s time trial is really, really short.  The GC contest is really between Contador and Froomestrong, because the perennial Spanish stage-race also-rans, Alejandro Valverde (Movistar Team) and Joaquim Rodriguez (Team Katusha), are no better than they ever are.  I think those two always vie for the final podium spot but get no higher than that, which is fine with me.  Valverde is a known doper, and Rodriguez has this thing where his upper lip gets pushed up way above his teeth, which combined with his overbite is aesthetically unsightly.  I know I should be kinder than that, especially since the poor guy has to put up with everybody spelling his name wrong all the time (i.e., Joaquin, as cyclingnews spells it) and he deserves better.  But that’s just how I roll.

The gap is down to 48 seconds between the doomed breakaway and the peloton.  They’re on the final descent before that brutal finishing climb.

The other big thing you have to know about this race is that a few days ago, a couple of the racers got in a fistfight, while riding!  It was awesome ... everybody else in the pack started chanting “Fight!  Fight!  Fight!” just like in junior high.  No, of course I made that part up, but the fistfight was real.  You can see here a video of Gianluca Brambilla (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) being told by the race officials, who are yelling at him from their car, that he’s out of the race.  (Footage of the actual fight starts about a minute into the video).  You should check it out ... it’s something to see.  Brambilla keeps gesticulating, as angry Italians often do, and then sitting up and riding no-handed.  I guess he figured “That’ll show ‘em!” and I can only hope he doesn’t do that when he’s riding in traffic and some car cuts him off.  That could be dangerous.    

So, were Brambilla and his foe, Russia’s Ivan Ronvy (Tinkoff-Saxo) ejected due to unsporting behavior?  No, it’s a bit more complicated than that.  The director of the race simply felt that their fight was disgraceful because they were such pansies about it.  And I have to agree.  They punch like little girls would if little girls threw punches.  I’ll bet any boxer could do a better job climbing the Puerto de Ancares than these guys did duking it out.  So needless to say, neither rider was given the day’s Combativity award.

It’s not the first time poor fighting skills have gotten people into trouble.  I got in a fight in my junior high gym class and landed what I thought was a pretty good punch.  It made the other guy’s mouth bleed, which I kind of felt bad about and kind of felt great about.  So then the guy started screaming and trying to kick me, and I dragged him over to the gym teacher.  To my amazement, the teacher—a war veteran, it was said—yelled at me:  “I saw the whole thing!  What is this—you land one good punch and then you come to me for help?  You don’t just hit a guy once!  You hit him again and again!”  I was bewildered.  Was this some reverse-psychology thing?  Anyway, I didn’t actually get in trouble, but having a crazy war veteran yell at you is overrated, as life experiences go.

The break is down to 17 seconds.  Sky is absolutely drilling it on the front.  It’s nothing but black jerseys and they’re taking the field apart.  Froome is sitting in third.  He’s easy to make out because his elbows stick out to the sides.  It’s really awful to look at.  The Eurosport announcer, Carleton I think he’s called, said the other day, “Froome is not flicking his elbow out to ask Contador to help ... his elbows always stick out.”

Is Sky setting the stage for an awesome come-from-behind GC victory for their man?  Could be.  Brailsford, the Sky team manager, said yesterday, “I think Froome can still win this Vuelta.”  But Brailsford also said, back in July, “It’s best not to put Bradley Wiggins in the Tour,” and said a couple years ago, “Blackberry doesn’t need to do a touch-screen ... the iPhone is a flash in the pan.”

Wow, Anna is calling me!  And she has pretty big hooters!  How do I close this pop-up without accepting the call?  I can’t handle that kind of distraction!

Man, this grade is brutal, and the road surface is medieval.  Rodriguez makes an attack!  It’s a pretty good one, too.  There’s 9K to go.

The lead group is really small now, like eight guys.  J-Rod, or “J-Wad” as he’s unaffectionately known in some circles, is still looking quite strong.  My online correspondent says of him, “He’s like an untrained porn star,” by which I think he means that J-Rod often attacks too early and blows his wad long before he’s supposed to.

Froomie is drilling it on the front with Bertie right on his wheel, out of the saddle, doing that slightly duck-footed lazy mongoose sway he’s so fond of (and which seems so effective).

J-Rod is bobbing a bit, but looking pretty solid, and he’s not doing the white man’s overbite yet.  Maybe today is finally his day.

To Contador’s credit, he isn’t wearing red shorts to match his red leader’s jersey.  His gloves and shoes are the same yellow his teammates get.  For that reason, and because his elbows don’t stick out, I’m hoping he’ll keep the lead today even if he is a filthy doping scoundrel.

It’s 17 seconds between J-Wad and the GC group.  Valverde is off the back.  Anna is calling again.  Fabio Aru (Astana Pro Team) is clinging for dear life.

J-Rod is only 2:29 behind Contador in the GC, but they can give him a bit of leash.  Contador has been doing this a lot:  letting, for example, Froomie go on ahead so that Valverde and Rodriguez have to chase while he, the accountant, sits on.  I’d have to say, those two podium hopefuls have done a lot more to help Contador than his Tinkoff-Saxo team has.

Wow, J-Rod is making it happen ... his lead is now 26 seconds.  There are time bonuses in this race, too.  Maybe he’s hoping Froome and/or Contador will blow up trying to close the gap.

Aru is just barely hanging on to the others.  Froome starts totally hammering on the front!  Whoah, Valverde is totally getting dropped!  It’s unbelievable how quickly he’s going backward.  Froome is going incredibly fast, and looking really awful with his long, skeletal arms out ahead of him like a zombie’s.

It’s 5.9 km to go and my feed has evaporated, straight up vacated.  Dang it!  I’ve hit refresh but all that’s done is get Anna calling again.  Okay, now I can at least hear again and eventually can close these pop-ups.

The next kilometer averages 13%.  In case you have no idea what that means, it’s just really, really steep.  Probably twice as steep as that awful climb between your house and the video store.

Froome and Contador have caught J-Rod.  Froome sits up and rides no-handed while he futzes with his sunglasses or something, and has now stepped up the pace.  I guess he’s trying to psych out Contador. 

Man, this grade is nuts!  It’s 14%!  Froome looks solid though he’s bobble-heading a bit.  Contador looks a bit tired, but I mean, duh!  He’s been racing for three weeks!  He’s wagging his jaw, but then he always does that.  Probably does that at the dinner table.  Froome’s neck must be tired as he keeps staring at the ground and then looking up, again and again.  Maybe he’s trying to burp.

It’s 4.4 km to go.  Camera switches back to Aru to show how he’s all alone and just suffering away.  Aru punched Froomie’s ticket at the end of a recent stage and took the win, so he can’t be too bummed now.  So the top five on the GC are the top five on the road at the moment.

J-Wad is dropped!  Did I call it, or what?

Froome is so gaunt, he’s at real risk of having his jawbone slice through his flesh.  It can’t be comfortable having less than 1% body fat.  I mean, how does he even sleep at night?  And how does he shave?  What does he even eat ... rice cakes?  He’s a mystery, this guy, or maybe a space alien.

It’s just Froomeboy and Bertie on the front now, about 3 km to go.  I’m starting to think this is a stalemate, unless the race officials command them to ride no-handed from here on out just to make it more interesting.  Wouldn’t that be great, if race officials could issue such commands, like the DJ at the roller rink who would sometimes say, “Now, skaters, turn around and skate the other way!” or “Everybody skate backwards!”

Carleton says, “The road is only 2% now, that’s nothing, but soon it kicks up rather rudely!”  I love these British announcers, in a strange way.  No, not that way.  I mean I love what they say.  Or more precisely, I don’t love what they say but I like listening to them say it.

Valverde is suddenly bearing down on these guys with a quickness.  

Froome is frowning, as if thinking, “I don’t like this at all!  I don’t like Contador and I don’t like this climb and I don’t like this sport!  But it pays better than being an extra in a zombie movie, which was my only other offer, so I guess I’ll continue on.”  

My daughter Alexa has pointed out that Froome’s jersey sleeve says “FROOMEY” on it.  Are you kidding me?!

Now he’s out of the saddle and his elbows are sticking out farther than ever ... it’s really ghastly.  But it’s no good, Contador cannot be dropped.  So all Froome is achieving is to help Contador pad his lead over the other Spaniards.

Contador will probably make a huge effort at the very end—the first time he’ll face the wind all day—to get the bonus seconds, since you can never have a big enough lead facing the final time trial.

Wow, there he goes!  Contador has attacked.  He’s grimacing and just absolutely killing it.  He really has the edge.  He’s got that George Mount grin (and if you don’t know who George Mount is, don’t sweat it—he’s even older than Duran Duran).  Dang, Contador is really pulling away.  I can just see the slight scarecrow figure of Froomie, in his cadaverous black kit, back in the distance.  Man, this finale is super-steep and Contador knows what the hell he’s doing.

I just hope that, when the time comes, he won’t do that pistolero victory salute where he mimes shooting a handgun.  This guy’s upper body is so spindly, he couldn’t take the recoil of a cap gun.

He’s got the win!  And he actually put both hands up in the air, like a proper winner!  What a pleasant surprise! 

Froome staggers in a bit later ... 16 seconds the final gap.

Valverde crosses the line almost a minute down.  And here comes J-Wad, upper lip stuck way the hell up there, totally bummed.  The rest of the peloton will come over in dribs and drabs over the next couple hours.

“I’m not suggesting he’s yodeling,” Carleton says of Contador.  Does this Eurosport announcing gig have a two-drink minimum or something?

The big loser of the day is Irishman Dan Martin (Garmin Sharp) who lost over 3 minutes, slipping from 6th to 7th overall.  He remains the only English speaker in the top 10.

And Contador gets his penultimate red jersey and a kiss from the podium girls.  I hope these women get hazard pay, having to kiss a sweaty cyclist every day.

Well, that about wraps it up ... this stage, my coverage, and the overall race since tomorrow’s time trial is only 10 km in length.  Nothing more to see here, move along, move along ... go mow the lawn or something ... make yourself useful.