Le Tour 2010

That's the etiquette of the peloton, always has been and always will be. As it was, given that Cancellara and basically none of the riders who escaped in the first group have a chance in hell of competing for yellow, they weren't really costing themselves anything. If anything, Cancellara harmed only himself, as he had every chance of keeping yellow for himself heading into tomorrow's ridiculously tough stage on the Paris-Roubaix cobbles.

As Cancellara said after the race, if riders fall and it is their fault, then the peloton will not wait for them. In this case it appears that one of the motorbikes or cars up front had left a spill of oil on an already wet road with tarmac breaking up, so the riders that fell had no chance of staying on their bikes.

Schleck took a bike from one of his team-mates, Matti Breschel, and managed to come off again 100 yards after his first crash. At least he showed his sense of humour after the race, when he said: 'I'd fallen on my right side, and thought I had better do it on the left as well or I'd have looked a little bit stupid!"

Well stop reading the bloody forum and concentrate then

13 km over seven sections of the famous cobbles to which I used to donate a direct debit to the Societe du Tour de France who effectively "own" the remains of the famous tank roads laid down during the First World War.

To prevent local farmers from carrying out "cheap" repairs to any pot holes by using tarmac, the Societe; who also own the rights to the famed Paris - Roubaix Classic ~ The Hell Of The North! maintain and carry out repairs to the remaining pave.

Cobbles on the flat are one thing, watching one of those hellish Flemish classics up close you can see how the pro's descend at such speeds that they efectively "bunny hop" three out of every four blocks of granite; whilst of course they will if, they are able; ascend in the gutter just off the cobbles which often leads to collisions with over enthusiastic spectators.

I've watched this phenomenum up close during the Ghent-Wevelgem cycle race on The Kemmelburg, a famous World War 1 heritage site which has an ossary at the summit of the 156 metres above sea level climb containing the bones of thousands of dismembered and hence unrecognisable bodies of soldiers from both sides of the conflict which lasted from April to September in 1918. A chilling information board informs the visitor to the heavily wooded site that not one of those trees existed after the carnage of 1918.

This particular race is hugely popular with club and sporting cyclists from London and the South East who pour off the early morning ferries at Calais and Dunkirk in their hundreds for the near 60 mile ride to the Kemmelburg................it's like a "Brits Tour de France" all of itself! Once there, if you are fit enough; you can gain up to 8 sightings of the peleton as they wind their way around the French-Belgian border and climb and descend the Kemmelburg twice in each direction. I must confess to satisfying myself with just sitting on the climb and foregoing all the other dashing around the last time I went over some 15 years ago as I had become far too slow and heavy to chase the race. Beer in hand and a bag of chips whilst bearing in mind that hellish ride back to the late ferry against the prevailing Westerly wind and still having to climb and descend the cobbles of the town of Cassel with it's little market square fairground at the top to tempt you into a final bottle of beer and bag of frites.

The Kemmelburg was the last time I had a close up sighting of the famous Eddie Merckx who was stood next to us watching his son Axcel make the climb for the second passing of the day and I was absolutely made up to note that "Le Cannibal" had ballooned alarmingly since his heyday as the world's greatest road racer so that he was (like me) a Fat Old Geezer.......................pure magic, so:"Merci Monsieur ~ chapeaux!"

Only flat stretches of cobble today on the outskirts of Arenburg just south of Roubaix, but if the weather is bad or not I (like many) predict carnage at the slower more protective style of riding of the the Tour when the domestiques will try to gather round their principal team mates in an effort to prevent them colliding with any rival riders, and that on these narrow little tracks will be potentially catastrophic....................I'm just tuning in now!

I came in from a couple of hours down at Market Road this morning watching some academy level coaching in some pretty crucifying heat and settled down to watch today's stage ~ an equally exhausting climb through the Haute Savoir to the ski resort of Morzine-Avoriaz....................another fine example of the French penchant for building "council estates in the sky" and the location of surely the highest altitude golf course I have ever set eyes on.

My kids have a cousin who spends the Easter and Summer holidays in nearby Annecy with her mum and gran ~ lucky little devil!

Today might just well have seen the effective end of the great career of the legendary Lance Armstrong, now almost forty years old and a unique seven successive times winner of the tour and conquerer of testicular cancer that also spread to his brain and lungs. The poor guy came off three times today and finished looking like that poor little robin ~ his red shirt all tattered and torn.

If he has had enough (and the look on his face and his body language seemed to portray that) and he simply cannot now contemplate winning from his overall position tonight; then "Chapeaux" to the great man and a true legend of the toughest physical sporting event in the world!

"Having a go" is certainly the operative word and it is a sobering experience to sit at home watching those guys rip up somewhere in forty odd minutes that took me the best part of a whole morning! I can't even descend as fast as those guys either, even though I am twice the weight of some of them which should enable me to if only I had the technique and bike handling skills.

I've driven up the moon like climb of the Ventoux where Tommy Simpson lost his life, and been driven up the 27 hairpin step ladder of the Alpe d'Huez ~ both in the heat of summer like the grimpeurs do but without the pain The thing that always struck me was that TV can never get over to you the sheer steepness of those climbs...................Alpe d'Huez in particular is like the roof of a cathedral.

I've never been to Sestrierre (nor near enough to even spot a road sign for it), but know it as a legendary climb of both Le Tour and The Giro d'Italia.

I think Lance Armstrong really needs it more than anybody else. Sunday's stage was a fascinating one. The big climb before the last descent seemed to murder absolutely everyone. Bradley Wiggins said that the heat was so bad that he had to back off before he did himself some real harm. As big as those two climbs were yesterday they are nothing compared to the rest in the Alpes and then the 4 day stint in the Pyrenees. Alpe d'Huez as steep as it is at 13.8km at an average gradient of 7.9% isn't quite as bad as Monte Zoncalon in the Giro d'Italia where the climb is 4 or 5km longer and has gradients of up to 23% with an average of 11.9%

Still, its quite an open tour this year. I get the impression that Andy Schleck wants to apply as much pressure on Alberto Contador as possible in the mountain stages. As for the other challengers I think Dennis Menchov might challenge and it'll be interesting to see if Team Radioshack demote Lance Armstrong to a "domestique" and throw all their resource behind Levi Leipheimer. I'm not sure that Cadel Evans can sustain so many mountain stages but he's a hardly competitor.

But what I want to know is how the hell does the local postie who cycles up The Madeleine every morning with Madame Miggins' paper, manage?