Rose Cantine

After Stage 14 yesterday (Mazamet to Plateau de Beille), Rasmussen kept his lead (2 min 23 sec over Contador). Vinokourov, the favorite, fell yesterday but it did not matter because he was already far behind. A spectator’s flag got caught in the wheels of Ivanov, causing him and Vino to fall on the ascent (read [...]

I had high hopes for Vino but after the first climb, he fizzled out. Rasmussen and Contador battled for first place with Contador winning in the end. I was hoping for Vino to do well in this stage and keep his place in the top ten, alas, that did not happen. Our lanterne rouge, Win [...]

Aleksandr Vinokourov won the time trials in Albi yesterday. Most people had already written him off after injuries he suffered early in the Tour made it very difficult for him to perform well in the mountain stages. But after winning in Albi yesterday he declared in a very Pythonesque way: “I’m not dead yet!
Watch the [...]

Michael Rasmussen, a Danish rider who has been wearing the yellow jersey in the last few stages, is also under suspicion of having used banned substances because he failed to report his whereabouts for out-of-competition doping tests. His excuse is that he was in Mexico (where his wife is from), training and simply failed to [...]

T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz was temporarily suspended by his team after showing elevated levels of testosterone in a pre-Tour de France doping control. Sinkewitz is out of the Tour anyway after an accident in which he hit a spectator two days ago. The German TV stations, ZDF and ARD, have decided to stop televising the [...]

Michael Rogers, leader of T-Mobile’s Tour de France 2007 team, who has been blogging in the Telegraph UK and providing us with a look on the inside, says (after crashing and quitting the Tour yesterday):
Yesterday my Tour came crashing down around me, literally! I was going pretty well in the first really big mountain stage [...]

It’s July and that means parking oneself in front of the television in the afternoon to watch the Tour de France. This year marks the first in a long time that there are no big stars. In the past few months we have seen well-known cyclists confess to having used banned substances. Some have [...]