The Tour starts! And Ends in Fiasco!

Wow, what a first day.

LLB and I returned from a weekend away on Sunday (ok, it was a short weekend away, we got back just after lunch) and sat down to catch up with Le Tour - six hours of coverage from the first day!! Having trimmed off the waffle at the beginning, and being able to skip through the adverts, it didn't take us that long to get through it, but - very much as predicted - it was a fairly standard flat first-week day, with not much going on but a very large peloton chugging round the coast of Corsica (forever entwined in my mind with Asterix) and being described by our commentators as "nervous".

I waved my new Lux ensign flag every time I saw Andy  (calling out "Hi, Andy!" at the same time, and getting A Look from LLB each time), and pulled faces at their Bianchi-coloured Trek bikes. Trek, what are you thinking? They look like Bianchi bikes! And they are - as we discussed on Twitter last week - almost exactly the same colour as Ass-t'na pyjama blue.

The ending of the race was a complete farce, though: with less than 20k to go, we started hearing that the Orica Greenedge bus had got itself jammed under the Finish line overhead gantry - you know, the one that carries the sensitive  hundredth-of-a-second electronic timing clocks and the special photo-finish cameras... so the organisers had to make a split-second decision, that took them five minutes to make, to end the race at the 3k to go line.

By this time the peloton were less than 10k away, and starting to steam up to sprint-finish speed.

LLB and I watched with mouths open, wondering what on earth the teams would do when told that the race was going to end 3k early, in an unexpected place, with no white line and no accurate timing.

We thought there would be visibly startled or cross faces, and lots of panicky conversation, but there was very little external sign of the change. Later, we found out that many of the riders didn't hear about it - a lot of them take out their earpieces towards the end, in order to concentrate on the sprint.

They certainly picked up speed, trains were formed, at the 5k banner - ie 2k to go to the amended finish - there was an almighty crash, and the news that the bus had been removed and the race was, indeed, going to end at the usual place.

I can barely imagine what this decision, so late, must have done to the team plans. Mind you, half the peloton were on the deck and bleeding: Johnny Hoogerland had been taken out by some flimsy barriers and all we could see were his feet waving in the air (he needed yet more stitches to add to his collection); Tony Martin was apparently knocked out completely, came to and was helped up, then "fainted". Side issue: don't you think it's unfair to use the word "fainted" in these cases? I mean, girls faint - men "pass out" or "lose consciousness". Tony Martin's butchness quotient has just lost five points, I am afraid.

So we had a slightly unexpected winner, well done to Kittel for not knowing anything at all about the problems, and for just going for it. In his post-race interview, he was asked "did you know that the race was going to finish at the 3k line?" and he actually pulled that face where the eyes and mouth all go completely round, like a bowling ball with a race cap on it. Clearly he had not been listening to race radio.

The organisers made the obvious choice to give everyone the same time, which on the one hand is the only thing they could possibly have done, but on the other hand must be really maddening for those who put in huge efforts to get ahead of the others. Mind you, they have their reward because the riders were "placed" according to the order in which they rode/limped/were carried across the line, so at least we have some sort of GC order now.

Having ploughed through that, we went straight on to Sunday's footage, more occasional waving of my Lux flag, one heart-stopping moment when a stupid little white dog ran out across in front of the thundering sprinting bunch... and an amazing, heart-warming finish when some anonymous RadioShambles rider (the graphic said Izigar, but it wasn't him, I didn't actually recognise the bloke but it turned out to be Jan Bakelandts) who had been in the 6-man break,  had the courage and fortitude to keep on riding away, even though his break had given up and were about to be absorbed. He just started pedalling again, the others were looking at each other, the peloton were also looking at each other, he kept on pedalling, he got to the 1k to go banner, the peloton stopped looking at each other and started looking at him, our commentator was screaming "AND IZIGAR JUST KEEPS ON PEDALLING IS HE GOING TO MAKE IT? HE MIGHT MAKE IT! HE CAN'T POSSIBLY MAKE IT!" and so on.

Izigar himself, if he was hearing this on race radio, must have wondered if he was in some sort of alternative reality, or was having an out-of-body experience where his Other Self was winning the race...

Astonishingly, Bakelandts made it to the line with about half an inch to spare - the first win of his career, and he wins a stage in the 100th Tour, amazing. I was nearly in tears, and I don't even know the bloke!

I must also mention that the lovely Jakob was in that 6-man break, having failed to fall in the water at the presentation (sorry Michelle, he didn't need your mouth-to-mouth, but I'm sure he was reassured to know that you were there, just in case), and he looked strong and capable.

So, the Tour has started, yay!  I'll probably be lurking on Twitter in the afternoons after work, if I get in before it ends, so I might see some of you there. And yes, I  promise I will try to keep the blog up to date with progress!

Oh, where are we so far? Andy came in 74th today (stage 2), just one second back, which puts him in 55th place in the GC: Jakob is 20th,  Jensie 101st.

Yay!