Last night, Mick Rogers dislocated a shoulder in a crash while maliot jaune virtuel and looking super-strong, Robbie McEwen, who's struggled since his crash on stage 1 (which he won, adrenaline ... ) was eliminated by missing the time cut, and Stuart O'Grady crashed, breaking five ribs, three vertibrae, puncturing a lung and breaking a collarbone.  Not a good day at all.  I'm sure we all wish our best to Stu for a hasty recovery.

Cadel Evans is still going strong, he's riding defensively, but is holding 6th place and if he can feature in some attacks later and/or pull out the stops in the ITTs he must be a chance for a podium finish.  Simon Gerrans is the other aussie left, and he's staying out of trouble, look out for him in a break in week three.  Maybe a chance for a stage win from him.

But, in an interesting development in Paris, which is related to bikes but not the tour, Paris is about to have a fleet of hire bikes (10,000 of them) all around Paris hirable for some tiny fee (~$45AUD for a year's access to them, ~$1 to hire them) and the guess is that they'll be within 300m of just about everywhere in Paris.  Rumour has it that the City of Melbourne is looking at something similar.  Makes a nice change from all the bunk in the Age at the moment about how dangerous riding bicycles is.  They don't talk about how dangerous it is being a passenger in a train, or a pedestrian, or the occupant of a car, but bikes ... ohhh .. dangerous!  It's the old story really, if it's in the paper, it's because it's rare (man bites dog).

Anyway, you can read about the bikes in Paris thing here. They're calling it a 'Velorution'.

In other news, a few of us made the trip to DISC for Sunday's masters training, and in John Lewis' absence (he's sick) I ran the sessions.  We had about 9 riders I think, including Nathan and Rob Monteith.  We did mainly sprint work, with Stu Vaughan helping out with a new drill to work on flying 200 lines, which worked very well indeed.  Everyone's lines improved significantly.  We then did leadouts and honesty sprints, and finished off with the enduro 'take a lap' Grand Prix.

And, Vanders is back from his 7 week jaunt through South America, and he was frothing at the mouth describing his 3,500 (vertical) descent on a MTB ride somewhere.  That's right, the descent dropped more meters than the height of Mt Cook.  -wow-

This Wedensday is the showdown at the Blackburn Corral.  Club/committee meeting where I need to get the details of the summer sprint series approved so I can start promoting it. I think I may have a workable compromise....

Get well soon, Stuey.