Another flat stage, another easy ride with a bunch sprint at the end. Another Cavendish win. The guy is just plain amazing.
Tyler Farrar rode a great sprint and just missed out to Cavendish in the final few meters. The American is going to win a stage eventually, but Cavendish is making it difficult.
I forgot to DVR the stage today, so I had to watch the primetime coverage. I normally DVR one of the mid-day replays on Versus for a few reasons:
First, I don’t like to stay up until 11pm EDT because I’m an old man who has to wake up for work.
Second, The mid-day replays are 2 hours instead of 3 hours, and that’s plenty long for any non-mountain stage.
Third, the primetime coverage has way too much of Craig Hummer, Bob Roll, and Robbie Ventura, and not nearly enough Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. I don’t understand how Versus can have one of the best announcing teams in sports and then sideline them for their flagship coverage. The coverage is packed with side stories, interviews, and featurettes at the expense of actually showing the stage. For my money, the live coverage and the mid-day replays do a much better job of balancing the coverage.
Not much to say about the yellow jersey race, maybe tomorrow I’ll do a breakdown of the contenders and what their chances are at the halfway(ish) point.
Rider of the Day
Mark Renshaw is an unsung part of Mark Cavendish’s success. All of Team Columbia has given Cavendish perfect lead outs in his sprints, and Renshaw has been dropping him off in perfect position to take almost all the sprint stages.
Reasons I Love the Tour #11 - The Farmland
Before I started watching the Tour de France, I never had any idea that France is such a rural country. Stages like today really give you a new appreciation for how beautiful the French countryside is.
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