La Vuelta, first half... or two thirds...

The first week of the Vuelta has proved to be a lot more interesting that the normal first week of a big tour, partly due to the shorter stages bringing out a lot more breaks.

For RadioShambles, Horner has done really well with a stage win, and wearing the red jersey for a day, but phew! what a weirdo he is. Did you hear his post-race interview? He was burbling on about Shack's whole plan and strategy being to get him in red and keep him there until he wins the race.

Huh?

Shack didn't even have an acknowledged GC leader, they sent along the best they could scrape up from their team, without including Andy (who was in the Pro challenge instead) or Frankie (for some stupid spiteful reason: wouldn't it have made sense to send him?) and Horner is the oldest bloke in the peloton, and not exactly tipped to do great things here.

I can imagine the rest of the team watching the monitor and saying "Whaaaaat?!" when they heard it. I know that riders are full of adrenaline just after a stage, but I've heard Horner talking at other times, and he really is slightly disconnected from the real world. Hearing him spluttering about Armstrong's innocence was painful to watch, particularly in light of Armstrong's later confession...

Fabian, on a better note, is looking fantastic as always, and he's looking quite strong as well, ha! ha! No, seriously, he's looking in really good form, he even did an uphill sprint to the finish - although I think everyone watching would secretly have liked Tony Martin to win that stage, after his heroic/bonkers one-man break for practically the whole day.

I have to inject a girly note at this point - doesn't the Belkin kit look good? When they first wore it, I thought it was a bit "simple", or "retro", as they call it - none of the intricate shading of the other teams, just simple blocks of colour. But I'm really getting to like it, and it's easy to spot in the peloton, which is a major factor in kit likeability. But am I the only person who thinks that a "belkin" is some sort of medieval codpiece?

Moving on from that, but staying with kit, I still wish that riders would be given individual numbers, or at least would have their names across their shoulders, as they do in football, so that we could more easily spot them. I'm having real difficulty spotting the lovely Jakob in this Vuelta, as the Pyjama Boys all look strangely similar. Usually I can spot all my pets by their riding style, or their stance, or their body shape (JVS) but the Pyjama Boys all look exactly the same, even Nibali. Most odd. Must be something to do  with their onesies. Perhaps they only have one size of kit, and they have to pad out anyone who's too skinny.

Back to the race... Euskaltel are going great guns, in every break: for the first few days it was definitely "contract break" in the hopes of getting an offer from another team, but now that Mr Alonso has come to the rescue, they seem to be determined to show their gratitude by getting lots of sponsor time, which is definitely the right thing to do. I even saw one group of spectators holding up a white sheet on which was written "Gracias, Alonso!" which was very sweet. I wonder which member of the family sacrificed their bedsheets for that gesture?

Luke Rowe of Sky, one of my pets, was doing very well in the early days (although he's now dropped out, not feeling very well, shame, but he lasted as long as Philly Gilly, which can't be bad) , and was cycling along with Johnny Hoogerland (another honorary Schlecklander) who was already sporting a bandaged knee and elbow, poor boy.

The weirdest thing about our coverage of the Vuelta is the theme music which Eurosport have chosen to go with the footage - it's, well, sort of Celtic. More appropriate for the Tour of Ireland, you would have thought?

Despite the music, there's been lots of sunshine and hot, hot days, right up until this weekend when it suddenly changed, temperatures plummeted, and riders started dropping out left, right and centre,  many of them from hypothermia. I have to say, the organisers don't seem to have much consideration for riders, do they? Not only do they plan out routes that involve huge transfers, so they don't get a decent rest after each day,  but they now move them from one coast to another, hurling them from 36degrees heat exhaustion straight into 6 degrees England on a Bad Day. It really does not seem fair. On one of the earlier days we had the treat of seeing Fab go back to the team car and have a quick all-over body squirt from a large aerosol container. Was it a special cooling liquid, asked our commentators? Nah - it was just cologne. Fab likes to smell nice.

On the same very hot day,  my pet Luke was out in the break with no team car - so the AG2R car gave him a bottle. Aaaw! I love this sport.

Going back to kit for a moment, one of the Shack riders, whose name I can't spell (sounds like Keizerlovski) is wearing his national jersey - except that it appears to be a complete national kit, including shorts. So much for the  RadioShambles "we put national flags into a tiny stripe" policy. Or was that Mr Becca's policy? Is this a sign of his waning influence? We can but hope. The rider concerned, however it is spelled, pinged off the front at one point, with the equally un-spellable Txurruca: they got a little bit of a gap, Keizerlovski flicks the elbow - but there is no-one there! He looks round in astonishment to find that Txurruca has faded back to the group, and he's there out front all alone.  And he's so embarrassed that, instead of zooming off, he drops back to the bunch, which made me laugh.

Later on that day, Edvald Boassen-Haagen-Daaz leaps off the front with only 14k to go. "Sanchez goes after him!" yells Carlton Kirby, our commentator. But which one? The helicopter is so high that we can't see which rider it is. Ah, it's someone in green kit, that means Belkin *snorts through nose* so it's LL Sanchez - the pretty one. Sammy is the scary one, you might remember, with the Klingon-style corrugated forehead.  Things are much easier now, as Luis Leon has had to withdraw from the race - yes, hypothermia, join the queue - so we only have Scary Sammy left.

So here we are, two thirds of the way through the Tour, hilly stage today, rest day tomorrow, then a final week of hills. But Wednesday might be dangerous, it's a non-hilly day which might mean one of those awful scorched-earth interior days.. and we all know what lives out in the scorched-earth areas, don't we? Yes, zombies! *laughs*   And what do zombies eat? All together now, "cyclists!". And what do they eat when they can't get any cyclists? "Each other!" That's right. Well done, class.  That's why it's very important to stay with the peloton on scorched-earth days.

And what of Our Andy, while all this is going on? Hopefully he's recovered from the stomach upset that saw him DNF in the Plouay short tour: RadioShambles have not yet announced who they are sending to Canada for the Quebec and Montreal GPs, let alone the Italian races and the Beijing tour next month, so I have no idea if we will get to see him race again this year. Somehow, I suspect that Mr Becca will punish him by refusing to let him ride again.. unless he sends Andy to Beijing in the  hopes that he'll get a nasty respiratory infection from that disgusting smog which blights this Tour.

No, I am not a big fan of the Beijing Tour.

Remember the first one, where the repressive local regime refused entry to spectators, so there was practically no-one at the finish lines? And that smog! I don't know what sort of coverage you all got, but here in the UK we kept getting lengthy travelogue promotional adverts for Beijing, showing glorious blue skies and fantastic distant views, happy locals and impressed tourists: then we'd cut back to the race, where you could barely see across the street for the smog, and there were six men and a dog in face masks watching our riders cough and sneeze their way around the course. It did not endear itself to me.

We have also had partial coverage of the Tour of Alberta, but we haven't had a chance to watch it while the Vuelta is going on, so you'll have to wait a little while before hearing my views on that race. But Andy wasn't in it, anyway... ("pff!")  so it doesn't get priority.

Right, back to la Vuelta: hills today, let's see if Mad Dog Horner can continue his truly unbelievable run of good form.