Big GC Guys Are Dropping Like Flies/How Can I Remember All of Their Names? And, Punk-!$# Move, Race Organizers! #letour

Beautiful Strangers: let's face it, after a half-Tour of crashes, crashes, crashes, drop-outs, and general mayhem, the GC at the Tour is, with mighty few exceptions, starting to look like a game of "what the !@#$ am I even doing here?", leaving pretty well 3 guys who can hope to take Nibali out before the Champs-Elysees, and that only if they hide his bike before the start of the queen stage and make him lose a good twenty minutes before he finds it tucked discreetly behind the Movistar team's dirty underwear. Is that why Nibs has been looking so, well, sort of sheepish getting his maillot jaune lately? Well, take some comfort Vincenzo--you actually made Alexander Vinokourov smile on the rest day yesterday, and at least they've got the podium-babe kiss-fest fiasco all resolved! Now if we could only keep anyone besides the lanterne rouge in the race...

People Who Live in Glass Mansions: and, hilarity predictably ensued when the intrepid journos over at cyclingnews asked all the living prior Tour winners whether Armstrong should keep his 7 Tour de France titles, with vets of the hard-core omerta days proclaiming their outrage over the injustice, others with reps and titles to protect justly equivocating, and the smart ones just keeping their damn mouths shut. Jaysus, I *just* caught like 10 seconds of "The Armstrong Lie" yesterday and had to turn it off for fear that the oily self-justification was gonna ooze out the TV's frame and permanently smear my flat-screen. Can we all just agree to give 'em to Iban Mayo and shut the door on this torrential bull!@#$? Thanks, UCI!

A Dilemma for Tinkov: so--and I know it's easy to put yourself in this guy's shoes--imagine you're a crazed Russian oligarch with a cycling fetish contemplating a merger with Cannondale, and you've gotta decide, where are you gonna put your money and your resources next year--on a brilliant bike handler/jailbait goofball all-rounder/potential Classics god-for-the-ages with the worst sense of tactical timing on the planet, or on a GC guy who was theoretically on the best form of his life but just got over having a pretty crap prior season? Me, I'm hoping for a massive internal war-fest over at the impending TinkoffCannondale between Peter Sagan and Alberto Contador in 2015 (and I'm betting that Alberto is gonna take out Sagan while the latter is distracted by swooning fans), but in the meantime, I suppose we'll all just have to wait to see if Alberto makes it back for a Vuelta media circus with Froomey for September. Look, look how upset this whole thing has made poor Oleg--he's trying to sneak himself and Tyler Hamilton into the Tour--shame on you *all*!


You Blow, ASO!: finally, a giant "you suck!" to the Tour de France organizers, who might've acknowledged a pain-wracked Andrew Talansky's valiant effort to stay just barely within the time limit and honor his hard-working teammates by *not* giving him a giant steel-toed jack-booted kick to the nuts and penalizing him 20 seconds for drafting behind a team car while ALONE FOR FOUR HOURS OF TOTAL AGONY! What the hell, you soulless freaks--you gonna penalize Froome for dropping out by hunting him down and smashing him down to the tarmac again?