Tour de France

Apropos of Matt's post about Bobby Julich's heinous injury in the Tour, I figured it might be time for a little recap and preview. The Tour started on July 1, but the real drama happened before then, when many favorites were banned for having been implicated in a doping investigation in Spain. Chief among these were Ivan Basso (Italy/CSC), Oscar Sevilla (Spain/T-Mobile), and Jan Ullrich (Germany/T-Mobile), who won the Tour in 1997 and then was pwned by Lance Armstrong.

The first 10 days of the race were pretty strange, too. American George Hincapie took the yellow jersey after stage 1, in which Belgian sprinter Tom Boonen was struck by a spectator's camera and Norwegian sprinter Thor Hushovd - possessor of the best name on the tour - was bloodied after brushing against a giant cardboard hand. Bandaged, Hushovd rode well in stage 2 to take the yellow jersey, then ceded it to Boonen after stage 3. Though Boonen failed to win a sprinting stage - his nemesis, Australian Robbie McEwen, has taken three - he kept the yellow jersey until stage 7 on Saturday. That day's time trial, as expected, shuffled the standings, putting unknown Ukrainian Sergei Gontchar in yellow and American Floyd Landis in second, one short minute down. Gontchar maintained his lead through Sunday's long flat stage, a rest day on Monday, and Tuesday's flat stage to Dax, just north of the Pyrénées.

The next two stages are going to be brutal. On Wednesday, the peloton tackles a 190.5km tour of the Basque country with three major climbs, including the Col de Soudet, which is so hard that it is classified as "hors categorie" - beyond the horrible climbs in Category 1. Thursday, the riders will face an even worse stage: a 206.5km monster that begins with the fabled Col du Tourmalet, an 18-kilometer HC peak, then runs over four hard Category 1 climbs to a finish atop the Pla-de-Beret in Spain.

All that climbing will certainly upset the standings, and without a champion like Armstrong to control the proceedings and assume the yellow jersey, the race is wide open. Deeply weird American Floyd Landis is probably the rider in the best position, a minute down to the current leader Gontchar. (For drama's sake, it's worth noting that Landis is riding with a hip so badly degenerated that he's going to have it replaced after the season.) Since even one big climb - much less five - can give or take away many minutes, lots of other riders, including the cadre of Spaniard mountain goats, have good cause to be optimistic. The big sprinters can only dread the hills and look foward to the three stages that will take the race from the Pyrénées to the Alps. Whatever the standings are then, I can guarantee no one will have been red-carded for a headbutt.