Wild Week

The first week of the Tour has been much more exciting than I really expected. Good crowds, exciting racing, the expected long breakaways and aggressive riding have all been present this week. Additionally, the fact that there has been no dominant team in the sprints and no team has seemed to be able to really put its stamp on the race and control the final lead out day after day after day may be evidence of the fact the peleton is cleaner than it has been in years. Teams and riders do seem to be paying for their big efforts. So here are my brief highlights of the first week so far.

The Big One

There is always a monster crash in the first week of the Tour. In variably it is some over aggressive inexperienced rider who causes it and knocks somebody important out. However, this year "the Big One" came during Stage Two and was caused not by a neophyte but rather Erik Zabel one of the best and most experienced riders in the peleton. Zabel swerved violently setting off the chain reaction that took down the Tour leader Cancellara from Team CSC, who initially seemed to have suffered a severe injury. Zabel is better than that and amazingly only Discovery Channel's Lithuanian sprinter Thomas Vaitkus had to abandon after the carnage.
However, Belgian Tom Boonen failed to win at home as he did not manage to get around his lead out man and settled for second.

It was Just a Flesh Wound

Proving that he was a worthy yellow jersey wearer and doing something that has not been seen since the reign of Bernard Hinault in the 1970's and 1980's, Team CSC's Cancellara roared past the four man break away in the final kilometer and held of the sprinters to win Stage 3 in Compiegne. Cancellara is not only the world time trial champion but he is also a former Paris-Roubaix winner which starts near the finish of Stage 3. It was an unbelievable finish as Cancellara showed grit, speed and determination in jumping off the front and managing to stay away to the finish. You do not see that much anymore. Obviously the winding finish over cobbles kept the peleton's speed low enough that the man in the Maillot Jaune could attack when he did.

Doping is not the Story

German officials and media continue to focus on doping as opposed to racing. Governmental officials threatened to pull funding for this year's world championships in Stuttgart due to doping issues. The ARD network took discraced pro Jorg Jaksche to Ghent for the finish this week. The ZDF network claims that cyclists are cheating because they are left alone. And then German rider Matthias Kessler's B sample comes back positive for testosterone which he claims must have been caused by the four packages of "natural supplements" with "chinese writing on them" he ingested before Fleche Wallone.

I am starting to think that the Germans just don't get it. If they want to combat doping then really take a stand as opposed to just keep threatening to shut down races or to stop TV coverage. Second, do not reward guys like Jaksche who has been under a cloud of suspician for several years now and who like Richard Virenque before, denied, denied, denied, before then spilling the beans on everyone he knew when it was good for him. Third, they need to recognize that the doping culture within German cycling arose largely in the context of the rise of cycling nationalism as Team Telekom/T-Mobile functioned as the defacto national team for Germany during the 1990's and early 2000's.

Cyclingnews.com has all of the details of the German media's frenzy but reported that irate viewers called demanding that the commentators covering the race stop talking about drugs and start talking about the race.