FINALLY! Something exciting has happened in this Tour!
Everyone thought this would be the year, where the Tour de France and the UCI would clean up the sport for good; it was to be a new dawn of cycling. Obviously, doping won’t go away overnight, but when a new case surfaced on a T-Mobile rider in the past 24 hours who had just crashed out of the race; German television took it one step further.
Sister networks ARD and ZDF refused to air coverage of today’s stage, stating they were only interested in a clean race to begin with. And since German television is run by their government, they had every right to protest and deny coverage. While they claim they will deny coverage until the rider’s B-sample is confirmed, the likelihood of that is unknown; as the German media were still in full-force today; and will likely be for a while (we passed them on the highway going in the same direction.) Plus that leaves 80 million Deutschlanders without a means of watching cycling.
120KM down the road to the west brought a complete change of scenery. Montpellier is a fantastically beautiful city. The buildings, the statues, even the people – lots of young, attractive women about! I shot some great pictures of the center of town at dusk. A group of us went out to dinner in a huge square, where we toasted the halfway point of the Tour. And schemed on how to surprise Mel on her birthday tomorrow; which she thinks we don’t know about.
*Correction on last post: apparently, Soler is Columbian, not Ecuadorian. I don't even know if there have ever been any Ecuadorian cyclists.
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