That all changed today — America’s Independence Day, appropriately enough — when the 27-year-old sprint specialist bested the field in the Tour’s third stage, a flat 198-kilometer run from Olonne Sur Mer to Redon.

Farrar has played second fiddle in sprints to Mark the Mouth Cavendish, the Manx Missile. He’s had some tough luck against Cav along the way as well. But today his Garmin-Cervelo mates positioned Tyler perfectly, and it was Cavendish who had to bang his bars in frustration as his HTC leadout train fell apart in the closing seconds.

Farrar is a real gentleman and credit to the sport. His win could help draw mainstream Americans back to the Tour in the absence this year of legendary Lance Armstrong. In any case, it is a well-deserved triumph for a guy who has waited a long time and worked tirelessly to improve — all the unlikely way from quiet Columbia River roots.

Radios were banned from this year’s criterium-style race, a smallish 10-mile circuit that the pros mind-numbingly traversed for more than six hours. Talk about the mobile equivalent of riding an indoor trainer.

Lacking radio contact, the peloton didn’t even realize that they were in danger of being lapped — which would have disqualified the favorites in the flat-to-hilly event and made a mockery of cycling’s premier individual race. Only when an old–fashioned motorcycle monitor flashed the old–fashioned card showing the diminishing gap did the peloton get goosed into protecting its status.

But no radios also meant that teamwork was out of the picture as well, leaving the race a chaotic series of pointless attacks and burn-outs. Pre-race favorites like Fabian Cancellara, Mark the Mouth Cavendish and Philippe Gilbert, who had modeled his entire season around the worlds, simply blew apart, having little support, no indication of how other riders were doing, and no ability to form in-race partnerships to improve their chances.

Even the TV announcers were completely caught off guard when the big group caught all the other riders in the final minute of the race. They were practically speechless. Without radio communications they had no ability to draw the big picture about how the peloton caught up so quickly.

Hardly anyone expected the rider who eventually won — Thor Hushovd — to be No. 1 across the line, simply because his stats would not have suggested it this year, especially given the competition on paper. Indeed, Hushovd won simply by sitting with the pack and turning on the guns in a sprint finish that Cavendish or Gilbert normally would have won, if they’d been around to provide any competition. Taking nothing away from Thor’s rainbow jersey, there wasn’t any strategy involved. He just got lucky by being in the right place at the right time.

Abetted by the lack of radio as well.

Depriving the race of radio might have seemed like a clever change-of-pace experiment aimed at making the event more competitive and unpredictable. Unfortunately it simply injected mass chaos and a distinct lack of drama into the event. Radio is here to stay. It ultimately makes the race more strategic and exciting. Let’s hope the boneheaded retro idea of banning it is dead.

The win gave the world’s fastest human on two wheels his fourth win in this Tour and 14th stage win in the Tour overall. The gap between Cavendish and No. 2 Julian Dean, a teammate of Wenatchee’s Tyler Farrar, made it look like the peloton was coasting. The overhead shot is pretty amazing as Cavendish bullets off the front.

We’ll try to get film at 11.

Otherwise the general classification stayed the same, with Alberto Contador retaining the yellow jersey by a scant 8 seconds over Andy Schleck. Tomorrow’s 32-mile time trial will provide the race’s real climax, either confirming Contador’s right to this year’s trophy or fueling a debate likely to last for the ages over whether he should have waited for Schleck on Stage 15.

Italian Alessandro Ballan jumped off the front in the final uphill riser, then Kazakhstan’s Alexander Vinokourov caught and passed him with 7 kilometers still remaining, speeding 14 and then 18 seconds ahead of the peloton. It was justice served for Vino, who nearly won yesterday’s Stage 12 before being passed by two Spaniards, Astana teammate Alberto Contador and stage winner Joaquim Rodriguez a few hundred yards before the finish.

This time, Vino was all alone.

We were happy for Vino, who has put his dope-clouded past behind him and, perhaps more significantly, seems to have adopted a “no-whine rule.” We once joked that “vino” is a synonym for “whine,” but he kept the lip zipped yesterday.

Brit Mark Cavendish took the ensuing bunch sprint, edging out Italian two-time stage winner (in this Tour) Alessandro Petacchi (our crack research team is calculating exactly how many “Alexes” there are in this year’s Tour). We’re still majorly bummed that Tyler Farrar had to pull out yesterday; this would have been the perfect stage for a head-to-head between Tyler and Mark the Mouth, both having lost their main leadout men. Make no mistake, Cavendish proved that he deserves the title of fastest man on two wheels. But that’s only as good as the next sprint, and we hope to see Tyler and Cav square off many times again in the future.

For now we’re looking forward to the next four days in the Pyrenees, starting with tomorrow’s Stage 14 ending in Ax-3 Domaines. Go Andy!

Full results from Cyclingnews.com.

Whether it was fair to kick Renshaw out of the Tour, or that the judges overreacted to his jockeying, had little to do with the ruling. Instead the judges, in moving quickly and decisively, wanted to send a much broader message to the pro cycling circuit.

Team HTC and its two Marks — Renshaw and the world’s fastest human on wheels, Cavendish — have adopted a win-at-all-costs strategy that, unfortunately, has reached the point of cheating. In making their ruling, the judges were saying, in effect, It’s time to stop with the bullying and “gladiator” tactics and do the racing “straight up.”

It’s time to play fair.

Wenatchee’s Tyler Farrar, who may have been cheated out of his first-ever Tour stage win, was visibly angry but managed to be his usual articulate and measured self, pointing out that the rules state you ride in a straight line during a final sprint. Whether Renshaw meant to cut off Tyler or not is beside the point; he broke the rules, and he did so knowingly.

Still, it seems obvious that had this been an isolated and first-time offense for Cavendish and his Team HTC mates, a lighter punishment might have been meted out. But it wasn’t.

Cavendish in particular has been repeatedly at the center of questionable tactics. He was himself disqualified from a 2009 Tour stage for playing dirty against rival Thor Hushovd. Earlier this season he caused a sensational crash in the Tour of Switzerland, leading to penalization and even a fine.

Most extraordinarily, the rest of the riders joined in a mass protest the next day against Mark the Mouth and associates. Having your comrades align against you is about as clear an indictment as can be handed out.

The protest should have been enough to get HTC to sit up and ride straight. Instead its only apparent lasting effect was to prompt Cav to shed tears of relief on the podium after his first stage win in the Tour last week. Much ink was wasted after Cavendish’s emotional display to the effect that he was putting his bad boy image to rest.

Instead, he may have merely been passing the baton.

Until yesterday, Cavendish was considered a lone outlaw. But when they saw his swagger poisoning the rest of his team with Renshaw’s actions, the judges decided to put an emphatic end to the spread of infection. If the gangrene of Cavendish’s ego is making its way to the limbs of his team support, then the only correct procedure is amputation.

This is bike racing, not professional wrestling, they declared (in so many words). If Renshaw wants to head-butt his way to victory, he is now free to join the WWE.

He’ll have to shed the helmet, though.

That’s right. As fierce as the competition has been on the Tour, we’re now at the point of head-butting to gain an edge.

TV footage showed clearly that Farrar teammate Julian Dean, riding as Tyler’s leadout man in the absence of Robbie Hunter, was impeded by Renshaw in repeated head butts. And that subsequently Farrar himself was cut off by Renshaw swerving alongside him. It may have been the impeding of Farrar, in fact, rather than the head-butting, that got Renshaw DQ’d.

A distraught Farrar — the cool-headed Tyler seldom blows a gasket — all but accused Renshaw of illegal tactics in the post-race Versus interview.

We’ll wait for the judges’ review, but to our eyes it looked like Tyler was cheated. He may not have beat Cavendish anyway, but Renshaw’s actions were out of line. (Renshaw denied in post-race interviews that he intentionally impeded Dean.)

[UPDATE: Twitter feeds are saying that Renshaw has been disqualified from the Tour.]

Full stage results from CyclingNews.com.

At the start of the stage, Farrar got more bad news when his Garmin-Transitions teammate and lead-out man Hunter had to pack it in with a broken elbow.

Joining a parade of riders with an incredible array of ailments and broken bones in this year’s Tour, Hunter withdrew after taking a spill in yesterday’s otherwise uneventful Stage 10.

Farrar himself is riding with a cracked bone in his wrist, an admirable feat given the inevitable pain and suffering any break entails. Farrar still hopes to make it to Paris and has another couple of tries for his first Tour de France stage win ever in sprint finishes.

But it’s not going to be easy with Hunter missing. An experienced, savvy and most of all bullet-strong sprinter himself, Hunter was the key to Farrar’s hopes for a sprint win. Not all is lost with Hunter’s departure, but it makes Farrar’s job all the more difficult.

Tomorrow’s hilly stage could supply some drama if climbers decide to make a race of it.

Additional notes:

If you’re wondering, as I was, if a DQ from the overall Tour had happened before, Belgian rider Tom Steels was disqualified in 1997 for tossing a water bottle at a competitor in the final sprint. (Thanks to @sonofabike on Twitter.)

Cavendish: Tears of a winner

In a pre-stage interview with Versus, Farrar was curiously coy about how he and his team, Garmin-Transitions, would play the day. The interviewer focused on Farrar’s teammates Robbie Hunter and Julian Dean — figuring, like the rest of the cycling universe, that Farrar would spend the stage recuperating from the broken wrist he suffered in Stage 2.

After the interview, veteran commentator Phil Liggett reiterated that Farrar had no chance in the stage, given how a sprinter must pull on the handlebars during the final out-of-the-saddle pounding toward the finish line.

Now we know why Farrar was so non-committal. He and Garmin were planning a little surprise for the final sprint.

Farrar made a strategic mistake, winding up on the wrong side of Dean during the final lead-out, but in any case did not appear to be at full strength. Which is fine. The fact that he’s back in the thick of things when many others would be throwing in the towel shows him to be a true champion, stage 5 win or no.

Other notes:

• Lance Armstrong is back to being heckled over alleged doping, a common practice during his 7-straight yellow jerseys but noticeably absent in last year’s comeback Tour.
• Cavendish, whom we like to tease as Mark the Mouth (we actually like his brash outspokenness) but who undoubtedly prefers the nickname “Manx Missile,” dissolved into tears on the podium. We assume tears of joy, or tears of relief, at his return to form after a pretty disastrous spring of disappointments (crashes, penalization and the cold shoulder of the peloton), but there may be a backstory as well that on-the-scene reporters will enlighten us with.
• And Paul Sherwen again gets the line of the day (besting previous champion Bob Roll) with a comment that “adding to the colors of the team jerseys in this Tour de France is the white of bandages that so many riders are wearing.” A testament to the innumerable crashes marring the early stages of the Tour.

Not only were there a lot — five altogether — a couple were highly unusual. In one case a dog, it looked like maybe a setter, ran out into the peloton. Giro d’Italia winner Ivan Basso went down in that one. There were also a couple of corner crashes and some near-misses on hairpins as well.

But the worst was saved for the last, and it set the table for the kind of unpredictability that made this year’s Giro so entertaining to watch. Just a minute or so from the finish line a huge tumble took out Mark Cavendish, the favorite to win the sprint finish — suddenly propelling Wenatchee’s Tyler Farrar into a potential win.

Farrar, as he later pointed out, was perfectly positioned, too — near but not at the front, ready to be slingshot into the fore by a lineup of teammates. Then disaster took him out too. Another rider’s front wheel touched Farrar’s rear wheel and caught its spokes in Tyler’s rear derailleur, tearing off the shifter. The rider went tumbling off, leaving Farrar towing his bike for several yards.

Italian Alessandro Pettachi, suspended in 2008 for overuse of asthma medicine in a case not considered doping, won the sprint in a finish that was hardly the gladiator faceoff expected between Cavendish and Farrar. Both of those riders handled their disappointment with shrug-of-the-shoulders aplomb. “These things happen in bike racing,” Farrar told the Versus Channel (34 on Seattle Comcast), which by the way is providing peerless coverage of this year’s Tour.

Because of the late crashes, everyone was given the same time, leaving overall standings unaffected and Fabian “Spartacus” Cancellara in the yellow jersey. Tomorrow’s stage 2 may result in a bit of a shakeup, containing the Tour’s first climbs.

Full report from VeloNews.

For Northwest fans, Wenatchee star Tyler Farrar — looking for his first stage win in the Tour — will get some pretty impressive help in the 2010 edition. Joining Farrar on Garmin-Transitions will be Brit David Millar, Americans Christian Vande Velde and David Zabriskie, and Canadian Ryder Hesjedal. All are versatile riders with strong sprint credentials and the ability to lead out Farrar in what promise to be some killer finishes against arch rival Mark the Mouth Cavendish.

Cavendish crashing at the Tour of Switzerland

Another sprint standout, and another victim of the Cavendish crash —Tom Boonen — is out of the Tour with tendinitis.

We’ll be pulling for Farrar of course, but the Big Picture issues for this year’s Tour include:

Lance Armstrong: Can he challenge, and if not, is this his swan song?

Alberto Contador: Is it a foregone conclusion that last year’s winner will repeat?

Andy Schleck: A spotty spring racing season punctuated by weird crashes leaves one of our favorite Tour riders a big question mark.

And finally, Will this be the first post-doping era Tour de France? With France’s anti-doping agency feuding with the official governing body, the UCI, and the cloud of the Floyd Landis-Lance Armstrong accusations hanging heavy over the sport, there is unprecedented incentive for this to be a clean Tour. But with Big Money still calling the shots, the temptations for cheating remain imposing as well.

It all adds up to one of the more intriguing Tours in memory. Now if the racing can only live up to the backstory drama, we’ll have a Grand Tour for the ages.

Bicycle.net’s full contender rundown.

And that 7th Avenue, a short but relatively copacetic bike route downtown, is getting buffered bike lanes.

On the racing scene, our Northwest homeboy, Tyler Farrar, won a Euro stage race, raising expectations even higher for this year’s Tour. With Mark the Mouth Cavendish crashing and getting penalized, Tyler’s chances of a first-ever Tour stage sprint win are looking better all the time.

USA’s one bright star on the downhill scene, pretty much dominated by Brits, Aussies and Kiwis — a Morongo Valley CA lad named Aaron Gwin — won it all at Wililngen in the Milka Wheels of Speed.

It doesn’t happen often, so when it does, we should celebrate: USA! USA!

And Fabian Cancellara won the opening time trial in the Tour of Switzerland, but … they did check his bike for silly little battery motors, did they not?!

So here’s a mountain biker who likes to ride in order to take a break from … professional golfing? We’ve heard of fixie polo, but never seen a knobby show up at tee time.

We have ridden on ice and ridden in the snow, so what can we say to the news that an American mountain biker died in a snowstorm in the Himalayas. Only that at least he went out doing what he loved.

How to respond to the ongoing misery in the Gulf of Mexico? One way would be to reduce driving by one fifth.

Final arguments in the case to end the obstructionist lawsuit that has delayed implementation of the San Francisco Bike Plan for, can you believe it, four years.