Stage Two:

We're really enjoying this first weekend of le Tour, with long hours of coverage of the first two stages. Today we are presented with filthy horrible weather and warnings from Carlton and Sean that the last few km are dangerously narrow, slippy, congested with road furniture, reverse camber and all sorts of horrible things. Nice to have something to look forward to, eh?

Thrill of the day is to see Cav in yellow, for the first time in his career, and beaming from ear to ear, with yellow helmet and matching bar tape. In his pre-race interview with the lovely Lowra - who we now know to have two eyes after all - he modestly admitted that he was unlikely to keep the jersey, so he was enjoying it while he had it, and was pleased to be wearing it, in respect for the charity... well done Marky, always good value for your sponsor!

No sooner had our coverage settled down, but we had one of those odd little inserts - JuanTo's picks of the riders to watch today. In an appalling piece of bad timing, just as he started speaking there was a massive crash, which we could see on the small inset screen, but not clearly enough to work out who was involved.

"Get off the screen, Juan!" we screamed at the tv, as we could see - well, was that Contador having to wait for another bike? Lampre all over the road, BMC looking for bikes, even Sky in trouble, but we couldn't see who, or how badly, and it was maddening the way that poor JuanTo unknowing continued burbling on, as we shrieked in frustration.  Oddly, it was about another 30kms until we finally got a replay of the crash and some details of what happened: Bertie definitely had to have a new bike but didn't seemed to have any new road rash or bruises to add to the ones he carried from yesterday.
 
With 82k to go, the original break of four were still plugging merrily away, with a nice big gap of around 5 minutes, and hooray for Bora Aragorn, they managed to get two riders in the break. Cunning plan, eh - lots of tv coverage, for a team that (with due respect) is not really able to compete for a stage win. Presumably they also want to cunningly mop up any KOM points on the way, so that Paul Voss can keep it: or at the very least, to prevent anyone else taking the jersey off him.

One thing about le Tour which is disappointing for me personally, is the lack of inflatabubbles. Remember them, from the Tour of Poland? They used to just come in a sort of light-bulb shape, so they were known (in Schleckland, at least) as inflatabubbles: but now there are inflata-tee-shirts, inflata-arches, inflata-clocks, inflata-candles and various other shapes. The Giro had a really good selection of them (I did try to find out how much they cost, in case I could get one of my own, but for some reason if you search for inflatabubbles you don't get much useful information) and one in particular caught my eye: it was promoting Selle Italia, which turned out to be an Italian bike manufacturer. It had a matching camper-van, and I began to wonder how much fun it would be, to be the person who was tasked with moving the Selle Italia inflatabubble around.

I mean, just think about it - a three week holiday in a beautiful new campervan: each day you drive to a new part of Italy, and quite possibly the company do the research ang give you a list of locations. If not, you might have to spend some time working out the best place to set it up: LLB and I thought that the "best" slots, by the sprint points, kom points, plus the 5km and 1km markers for each of those, would be auctioned off to the highest bidders, and indeed many of the arches (both banners and inflata-arches) had a matching inflatable, so presumably if you pay to have your name on a banner or on the hoardings, then you get first dibs on putting up your co-ordinating inflatable there.

So the Selle Italia inflatabubble team would have to find a place where they were most likely to have tv coverage: potential accident spots, long slow curves, narrow pinch points, and anywhere within the frame of a famous landmark. Having blown it up and tied it down, all you have to do is sit around enjoying the sunshine, wave to the Tour caravan as it goes past, wave to the race, then as soon as they are safely past, you deflate your inflatabubble, pack it away. and drive off to the next location on your list. If it rains, you can sit inside the campervan and put the kettle on: if it's hot you can sit outside and enjoy a cold drink from the fridge. There's no hassle about finding hotels, as you have your own bed with you!

And, best of all, you get paid! Either the person who does it is a Selle Italia employee, in which case you're already being paid, or (more likely) you are hired in for the occasion, in which case you get an all expenses paid three-week holiday, and get to see the Tour every day! Fab! How can I sign up?

I'm thinking about campervans at this moment, in case you are wondering, because the peloton has just gone through a roundabout with a vast number of campervans parked on the verges all the way around it, and I asked LLB why there should be so many of them, in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. He suggested that, by parking on a roundabout, you gave yourself a quick exit to drive out sideways and get ahead of the race, which sounds perfectly sensible to me.

Obviously the Selle Italia inflatabubble team won't be in the Tour, but I was hoping that I would find another promotional inflatabubble to covet: alas, there don't seem to be any. Shame.

Getting back to the race, we're down to less than 50k to go and a five minute gap, which normally means that someone from the break would win the stage: however, this would mean that they would also take the yellow jersey: and we somehow think that Dimension Data would not be keen to lose the maillot jaune to someone like Fortuneo, or Bora Aragorn!

Lotto are presumably leading the team competition, as they have turned out in horrible yellow helmets: I know it's "allowed", but really, urgh, nasty shade of yellow and it causes quite a lot of spectator confusion, as we can't work out where Cav is.

Special Award of Heartbreak Of The Day has to go to the Trek guy in the original break - Yasper Styvesant - who was finally caught within 1k of the line, which is always heartbreaking, but worst of all, no-one noticed that the time break indicator was showing us the gap between him and Cav, not the gap between him and the chasing group, so we all thought he had a minute in hand and was actually going to win the stage.  I can only hope that his DS, on the headset, was better informed.

In the end, as you all know now, Scruffy Sagan won the final sprint and took not just the stage, but the yellow jersey as well: and the hilarious part about that was the way he gamely sprinted to beat Allaphillipe, but totally failed to celebrate the win, crossing the line with a glum face. He said afterwards that he thought there were still two guys ahead of him, and that he was only sprinting for 3rd place!