Not The Way You Want To See It

Stage 4 of the Tour de France was the always important team time trial, a stage Lance Armstrong's team had won the previous two years. The race took the riders from Tours to Blois along the Loire River, providing great pictures of the many castles that make the region so famous.
The teams to watch were Lance Armstrong's Discovery, Jan Ullrich, Alexandre Vinokourov, Andreas Kloden's T-Mobile, and Dave Zabriske and Ivan Basso's CSC. As everyone thought, it was close all day because of the primarily flat course and the tailwind that was pushing the riders along. In 1999, Mario Cipollini won the fastest ever road stage that finished here, so it wasn't a surprise that today was the fastest ever team time trial.

At the first checkpoint, CSC led Discovery and T-Mobile by just seconds, while the other American-led teams Phonak (Floyd Landis, although they haven't decided who's leading the team) and Gerolsteiner (Levi Leipheimer), were watching their teams fall behind. As the day went on, the pace quickened, with CSC holding onto a 2 second lead over Discovery with just over 6 miles left with T-Mobile starting to lose ground. In the last 6 miles, it was Armstrong taking over, driving the Discovery boys to the finish where they beat T-Mobile's time, which had been best time, by 36 seconds. CSC was the last team on the road and they were flying to the line, trying to keep Zabriskie in yellow. But with just under a mile to go, Zabriskie touched the back wheel of his teammate in front of him and crashed, hitting the pavement and the barrier on the left-hand side hard. So regardless of the stage itself, Zabriskie had lost the overall lead as he was left to finish by himself while the team tried to salvage the long-coveted victory over Discovery. But as they hit the finish line, they saw they had lost by 2 seconds. 3 straight team trial wins for Armstrong & Co., 1 badly bruised and scarred Dave Zabriskie. It's nice to see Armstrong back in yellow, but that's not how you want to see it happen.

So, Armstrong leads teammate George Hincapie by 55 seconds. Notables include: Vinokourov 1:21 behind, Basso 1:26, Ullrich 1:36, Landis 1:50, Leipheimer 2:21.

Tomorrow should be another day for the sprinters as the eastward trek continues across France, heading towards Germany.

The only other exciting thing that happened today was I basically got my paper rewritten today. So I am very close now, very close to being finished.