Of course I'm still madly following the World Cup, but for the record, in cycling I am all about Slipstream Sports (Jonathan Vaughters & co - follow @Ride_Argyle and @Vaughters on Twitter) who are riding in the Tour de France as Garmin-Transitions. (Note to JV: those are perfect sponsors: products that cyclists (& their legions of fans) can actually use! In contrast, there is nothing particularly sports-related about banks and telcos and lottery companies...not that we're not grateful...)

I hadn't even had time to post this before the team's fearless leader Christian Vande Velde sustained an injury serious enough to make him withdraw. It's been the crashiest start to a Tour I've ever seen. Oil on the road, drunken spectators, the dog...to paraphrase one of the riders, who brings an unleashed dog to the Tour, it's just bonkers... (Route planners - sadists?) The team sprinter Tyler Farrar only one of many riding with broken bones. On another team, Frank Schleck out and his brother Andy holding his own injured arm across his body, white-faced, before a teammate gave up his bike and he rode on. 

Closer to the end of the Tour there will be a special celebration of the Pyrenees, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the inclusion of that mountain range in the Tour. Fun for us, not so fun for the competitors. (If it weren't in storage I could re-read Ladurie's Montaillou: a[nother] study of people suffering for their faith, stubbornly, in the Pyrenees...)  

I have subscribed to the versus.com live streams, which means I get no music (which I miss) or fake crowd noise (which I don't miss) and the knowledgeable Aussie Matt Keenan doing the English commentary for most of the race; then usually Paul and Phil pick up from there, or sometimes it seems to be Phil and Matt (and in either case Phil seems to be rolling his chair back and forth from another assignment, which I can hear snatches of in the background, and sometimes he rolls over to "our" mic with an out-of-whack energy level and (as the Phil-haters enjoy reminding me) misinformation). But it's true about Matt's accuracy: his pronunciation of non-English names isn't terrific, but when a shadow flits across the road he knows who it is and what move they are making and why. And when the camera focuses on someone's gears Matt looks at them and says what they mean about the rider's intentions. Onya Matt!

More about Matt here...

As a onetime honorary Aussie I'm thrilled to see so many Aussies still on the bike (Robbie, Stuart, etc.) and am pulling for Cadel Evans, the first ever Australian to become world champion, who is now in third place. And I'm brooding exactly as I did last time Evans was in this position, thinking, he's a great rider but without the support of a strong team...

From the outside it seems that Slipstream is able to get good people because they treat the team members with respect and offer them a chance to prove what they can do as athletes without having to "cheat because everybody else does it." (Or am I just biased because so many of their team members are good writers, most notably David Millar, the world's most eloquent ex-doper, and David Zabriskie, master practitioner of the one question interview? I miss Will Frischkorn who showed such promise as a writer and cyclist on the roads, but he is now the Marketing Manager.)

Floyd Landis is watching the race on TV and talking to the Wall Street Journal. He was a Mennonite kid who got into mountain bikes and was swept up (probably too quickly) into the high life with Team USPS. His public pronouncements (even before the scandal) always struck me as whiny and defensive and chip-on-the-shoulder. And his pronouncements now have the exact same tone; that is to say, to me they ring true. Among other things Landis says that the minute things started to come unglued after the 2006 Tour "win", Vaughters contacted him and told him to tell the truth, that it would be better in the long run. It took Floyd lots of therapy to get to where he agreed.

I don't have an ending for this piece: literally and metaphorically there are many stages still to be raced. (Added later: I have figured out why this subject fascinates me. Aside from the inherent human drama, it's an examination of the problem, "it's wrong but everybody does it and so in order to compete..." which is a problem that we can all wrestle with.)