Transfer predictions

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Well, tomorrow is the first of August and transfers can then be officially announced.

As usual, there have been masses of rumours for the past few weeks, and most of them have been strenuously denied - but of course, a lot of them will turn out to be true. It must be very hard to have to lie and say "no truth in the rumour" when you know it's going to be true, but you can't talk about it until after tomorrow...

So, here are my predictions as to who is going where.

Firstly, Astana are going to have a team of about 50 riders, if everyone who has been linked to them actually goes there. That could leave a few of the other teams a bit thin on the ground.

BMC are going to be particularly hard hit, as virtually all of their team are going to jump ship, leaving just Cadel Evans and Phillipe Gilbert to carry the Ladybird flag.

Stinkoff are going to beat even Astana, by having in excess of 70 riders: Jakob is going to be leading a special team, a sort of sub-division of Stinkoff, so that he can be Team Captain, with Bjarne getting back in the saddle to be a domestique.

Sky are going to be completely unchanged: everyone wants to join them, but no-one is going to leave, so there won't be any spare places on the team. After all, a team that can persuade Cav to join them, despite telling him up front that he won't have a dedicated lead-out team: that can then give Cav what he wants, ie stage wins plus the Champs Elysee win, AND get the Maillot Jaune, AND get another rider in second place on the podium: well, hell, you don't get teamwork like that without having happy riders ("Shack, are you listening?") and who wouldn't want to ride for a team that can do that?

Meanwhile, what about the Olympics? Well, GB didn't do particularly well, but frankly I think that was a good thing: after winning the Tour, and hogging two steps of the podium there, plus the Champs Elysee stage, well, it would have been greedy to have taken medals as well, don't you think?

Besides *glances over shoulder to make sure no-one is listening* there are no UCI points, and no jersey: Worlds and Nationals are more important really, aren't they?

The race itself was not wildly interesting: Box Hill can't exactly compete with Cols and Murs, and most of it was just flat, flat, flat.

There were reports in the cycling media that the riders were "shocked" at the sheer quantity of spectators along the Olympic route. Well, so were LLB and I - I'm still staggered that so many people turned out to see it - we had TV coverage (well, sort of) of most of the race, and there were hardly any places, in over 200km, where the spectators were not filling the barriers.

In fact, Andre Griepel commented that there was "nowhere to pee", there were so many spectators! Apparently there was one patch of grass, quite early on, and they all pulled over to use it. Truly amazing, for a country that isn't that "into" cycling. I suppose it's a sign of how much Sky Cycling has raised the profile of the sport in the UK, so yay for Sky!

The coverage of the Road Race was utterly dreadful over here: the camera-work wasn't bad - not as good as the Tour but then, what is? - but the commentary was truly terrible. The commentators didn't seem to know who any of the riders were, they couldn't identify riders who were in the break or chasing, there were no graphics AT ALL to tell us how much of the race was yet to go, and there were great long silences where they apparently didn't have anything to say. Unlike the crowds, who cheered all the way in a "wave of sound" that left the cyclists with ringing ears, so they said afterwards.

Of course, it was very distracting to see people not in their "proper" team kits..

But it turned out that the commentators were in a box at the finish line, being deafened by the tannoys, so they couldn't hear race radio: their viewing screens were so badly positioned with the sun on them that they couldn't see clearly, which explains why in the last three kms we were being told that it was Henao who was up there with Vinokourov, whereas it was, of course, my pet Rigoberto "so good we named him twice" Uran Uran. Oh, and the best excuse of the day, afterwards, was that the spectators along the route were using their mobile phones to tweet in such quantities that they overloaded the system coverage, preventing the GPS transmitters on the bikes from getting their information back to the control room.

Really? Mobile phones can interfere with bike positioning, now? This could become a whole new sport - Spectator Swamping, where fan gather in large clumps, all tweet furiously as the race goes past, to see if they can get the "kms to go" graphic off the screen.

Actually, that's a silly idea, please don't do it.

Going back to the road race, the final crushing blow for our coverage was that we saw Vino cross the line, followed by a rider that LLB and I were damned sure was Rigo (despite the commentary still saying it was Henao), then suddenly we were watching some deadly dull and incomprehensible "sport" which seemed to be using paint-ball guns. What - no list of the finishers? No podium coverage? You could at least tell us who came third?

Predictably, the BBC have apologised for their crap coverage and have blamed it on the host broadcaster. Let's hope they do better for the TT on Tuesday.

And let's hope that Fabian is recovered sufficiently to do himself justice. I don't know which would be worse - for him not to be fit enough to defend his title, or for him to take part even though he's in pain, and be beaten. What do you think? I think I'd rather he sat this one out, if he's not fully fit for it. After all, he did land heavily on that same shoulder that only recently had enormous pins in it.... ouch.

The only moment of humour in that entire episode was that as the peloton came to the same point in the race, our commentators said "..and the peloton are now approaching Cancellara Corner, let's hope they all get round it safely..."

One final word about Vinokourov: I am going to have to eat my words about this rider.

I don't like him: he's an unrepentant doper. He was caught doping during the Tour in 2007, the episode where his team, Astana, were thrown off the Tour: predictably, his own national body decided to ban him for just one year, rather less than the normal 2-year ban for blood doping. The UCI were about to push for a two-year ban when he announced that he was retiring. Two years later he came back to cycling. OK, technically he was "out" for two years, but he can still say that he was only banned for one year, grumble grumble. And he was not repentant.

Also, he has no eyebrows.

Last year he announced another retirement, and said that he was going into the management of the Astana team at the end of the season. Then, of course, he then had that terrible crash in the Tour, the one where he had to be hauled out the ravine by his team-mates, with legs dangling uselessly below him and pain all over his face. Clearly, it was time to retire. He retired.

Ah, but the UCI rules say that anyone with a doping ban can't be allowed to be part of the management of a cycling team. So this year he announced that he was riding again.

Now, I was the one who said repeatedly that in my opinion, he was only "on the books" as a rider because he wasn't yet cleared to move into management, and I rather smugly suggested that he wouldn't ride a single race.

Well, I was wrong, he rode. He rode well. And now he's won a gold medal in the Olympic road race.

*sigh*

Pass the ketchup, here I am eating my hat.

I still don't like him, he's still an unrepentant doper, and he still has no eyebrows, but I am beginning to admire him as a rider, especially as he most definitely is not on drugs now, as he will be one of the most-tested riders in the peloton, I would have thought.

Meanwhile, what's going on in Luxembourg? Well, thank the lord for Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour, and then Mark Cavendish not quite winning a gold medal, they've taken all the publicity and no-one is talking about Frank Schleck's fight to clear his name. Poor Frankie, we can only assume that he is seeing lawyers, making lists, having things analysed, and waiting anxiously for results.

My heart goes out to Martine, I can just imagine her at the school gates dropping off Leea, with the other mums asking "So, how's your husband doing?" with malicious smiles. Or little Leea in the playground, with the other kiddies poking her and chanting "your Daddy's a doper, your Daddy's a doper." Yet another reason why I just don't believe that Frankie would do anything illegal: he's far too much of a family man to put his family through this sort of thing.

RadioShack haven't put their team rostas for any forthcoming races yet - curses on them, they never do - but we are still hearing that Andy will be racing in Canada and in China, and now there is a possibility that Jakob will be racing after all: he's on Danish TV in 15 minutes' time as I write (ah, the wonders of the twitterfeed on the Shack site!) but alas, I don't have Danish TV, nor do I speak Danish. If you have, and do, then please do feel free to tell us what he says!