If somehow you just crawled out from a manhole cover, or returned from a space shuttle mission, and you haven’t figured out where to watch or listen or log onto the 2009 Tour de France, Bike Hugger has the rundown…
I watch the Tour on Versus, follow results on Velo News and listen via Twitter. Hey there’s nothing like being fully plugged in while you wait 3 hours for something interesting to happen. Today (Stage 7) I was disappointed at the lack of attacks. It seemed like everyone was just out for a country ride, courtesy of their paid team of guides called Astana. Beautiful scenery, I must say.
But this was the first mountain stage, with two more on the way. Tomorrow could extract a higher toll as recovery time starts to be a factor. Although Alberto Contador looked like he could climb for hours, tomorrow is always another day. I wish I could say may the best rider win, but I fear doping is still a problem and still games the results. Doping is key to recovery turnaround, of course, so maybe if we see some attrition in the back-to-back-to-back mountain stages, we’ll know the peloton is finally cleaning up its act.
Biking Bis: Rain forecast for the second day of the 200-mile Seattle-to-Portland classic. I did this ride a number of times back in the day (in this case, the 1980s) and can remember getting drizzled on. But the ride later moved to mid-July to virtually guarantee sunny, warm, dry weather. I mean, normally it’s a lock.
But this spring/early summer has been different. After a ruinous first half of May, which dumped twice the month’s average rainfall in a matter of two weeks, Seattle had nothing but dry and mostly sunny weather through June. As any grizzled Northwesterner knows, you eventually have to pay up for a run of good weather. Looks like this weekend could be an intro to the Great Reckoning, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed for otherwise.
PinkBike: Hornby Island. Hornby’s a classic XC place with rollicking, swoopy trails. A bit of a challenge with all the ferries, but worth it in the banana belt of the Gulf Islands.