IT'S THE TOUR!!!

Gasps with relief! The Tour has started, we've just watched Stage 1, and all is well.

Firstly, a quick word about the presentation. No, not about the booing, about Team Thunderbird (note for non-UK viewers,  Thunderbirds was a kiddy's puppet series, long, long before CG was invented.)

Why is Andy standing like a puppet? Who knows...right, that's enough about that!

So, stage one nicely under way, I am quite bemused by the number of crashes: it was lovely weather, bone dry, dead flat, no cobbles, but people tumbling off all over the place. Poor old Greipel from Omega Pharma Lotto, hitting the deck before the race had even properly started! Not a good stage for O-P-L, they had half their riders wearing bandages by the end of it.

And what about that poor O-P-L rider , Van den Broek, [Van de Walle! Jurgen Van de Walle! Sorry!] who was diligently putting an arm up to warn the others about a traffic island, and who then went "Slam!" down onto the tarmac. I don't think  I've seen anyone hit the deck quite that hard at such slow speeds. And he spent pretty much the rest of the race at the front, pulling! I think he's the one who should have won the "Combative" jersey....

Early on the race, LLB and I were discussing the Conti thing, and we both agree that although the best thing would have been for him to have chosen not to race - this is my point again about bringing the sport into disrepute by having booing - he was within his rights to do so, so we have to put up with it.

After much discussion, we came up with a solution: if Contador were to have a, say, moderately minor mishap and have to retire from the race, then his face would be saved in that he started, and everyone else could relax and enjoy the race.

Yes, the eventual winner would have to endure some "ah, but if Contador had been in it, he would've won" but we decided that after a few months, people would forget about it, so it wouldn't detract from the win. Well, not much. Especially if Conti wasn't in that strong a position when he retired....

And the nature of this moderately minor mishap? Well, how about the old "stung by a bee and had to go to hospital thus having to retire" routine?

Or there is always that good old standby, food poisoning - but not from steak, of course - sufficient to make him withdraw?

Or the famous Frankie broken collarbone - my personal favourite.

Of course, this came back to bite us when we saw that he had been caught up in the first of the two final crashes..... 

In case you haven't seen it, a stupid, stupid spectator was standing on the grass verge, somewhat too close to the road, and one of the Astana riders collided with her. She did nothing to avoid the collision: she couldn't, as she was looking the other way at the time. (Fingers crossed that it wasn't Leelu: Lee, that wasn't you in a bright yellow overlong tee, was it? Or was that you at the finish line, waving an inflatable kangaroo? We weren't sure where you were, so we shouted out "Hi, Leelu!" at 10km intervals, just in case.)

So he ended up 1'20" down, shame (*laughs hard-heartedly *).

OGL was then caught up in the second of the final crashes, although he managed to stay on his feet: and best of all, being within the last 3km, Article 20 was invoked (thank you, BoulderEl, for telling us the name of the 3km rule!) so he didn't lose time for it. (*laughs smugly*)

Now, this plays nicely into my plan - Contador now has a chance to stop all the booing. He is now well over a minute down, and he looked tired, stressed, and not in good condition by the time he got across the line. If he maintains a stoic demeanour, and says things like "Well, these things happen", he might find that he gets a bit of sympathy.

If he then does something nice for a French rider, such as letting them wheel-suck up a hill, then perhaps the French might change their minds and stop booing him.

And if he then swallows a wasp at high speed and has to go to hospital, thus withdrawing from the race... well, wouldn't that work out well? 

In a perfect world, Frankie and Andy would beat Contador up a particular mountain, in a fairly convincing manner, and then Conti could have the accident/injury/debilitating food poisoning episode, and retire. Thus no-one would say "Ah, but if Conti were there....." instead they would be saying "Yay! Andy/Frankie is a well-deserved winner of the Tour, pity poor old Conti wasn't on form, and swallowed that wasp, but, well, he wasn't riding well, look how they thrashed him up the [insert name of mountain]."

Finally for today, what happened about the rider who went the wrong way and shot off into the buildings? Anyone else see that? It was at 123km to go, so just a little while after Van Dem Broek crashed.

The peloton came up to a biggish roundabout, they all went round it in the usual two streams, except for this one guy.  In the screen cap below, we are viewing the peloton head on: the main field are following the camera bike round to the right of the screen, and you can see the one guy - thinly circled in red - who shot off to the left.

Seconds later we got the aerial shot of the same moment, so here they are going in two streams around the roundabout, and the mystery rider is shooting off at right angles, to the right, through a gap in the crowd.

I've circled him in red, (it was a lot clearer when he was moving) and you can see him going over the crossing stripes, to the far right of the picture.

No-one ever mentioned it!

It was too brief and too unclear to identify the rider: I can't even decide on the team for sure (as Andy and Jensi say) but I think it's Garmin. At least, he's wearing the same blue hat as the other Garmin rider.

Any suggestions?!

Well, I'm so happy to finally be watching the Tour, and I hope that we're all going to enjoy swapping comments and points of interest over the next three weeks.