The Tour is taking a rest day today. What’s that about? Rest day! What about me and other viewers like me? What are we supposed to do while the riders are slacking, luxuriating in bubble baths and drinking champagne and generally not riding their bikes and cat and mousing one another? It’s an outrage! There should be no rest days on the tour. None! Lazy slackers!
If you put the missing rest days back in then the Tour would be closer to 4 weeks long than 3. Imagine it! A whole month of the Tour de France. July truly would be the Tour month, every day of it. How fabulous would that be?
But would it be enough? How about all of the (Northern) summer? And have all the epic races of June July August merge into one big Tour de Europe? Or even better: why not have it last all year long? A Tour de World with races on board cruise ships as the cyclists are transported from one continent to the next. And with no rest days ever. In fact “rest day” would become a euphamism for dropping out of the race (permanently). Winners would be announced on a daily, weekly, seasonally and yearly basis with all the existing races (yellow, green, polka dot etc) in place but extra categories like a running silver jersey for the racer who’d been in the race for the longest and . . .
I can’t stand rest days! Why do I have to wait almost twenty-four hours for the next stage?! Especially now that Armstrong isn’t in yellow! Aaaaarrrggghhh!!!!!!!!!!
See, this is the kind of day that you pull out your DVDs of your favorite races of past years. For tonight, I’m thinking of either the 2004 Paris-Roubaix (Magnus!) or the 2003 Tour de Romandie (Tyler!).
Also, you do realize that Voight taking the jersey is actually good for the Discos, right? I was hoping for pretty much anybody besides a CSC, because now CSC will have to burn a bunch of matches to defend, and it’ll be them chasing instead of attacking.
Watch for Chris Horner to go for a stage win tomorrow or Wednesday. You heard it here first.
Also, just because not enough people are saying it, allez Joseba!
yeah, yeah, yeah. Stupid rest day!
I know! A day without stage coverage? What am I supposed to do with myself? A Tour highlight program isn’t going to do me any good since I’ve watched every stage from start to finish. (I even got up at 6:30 yesterday just so I could watch live coverage of Stage 9!)
Bah. No fair.
Baaah rest days! Chuck ‘m. Sissies. Thank goodness the endless nattering on tv does go on tonight, and ‘we’ have had a smashing good weekend, so natter away we will!
John Wilcockson’s got a pretty good preview of the upcoming Alpine stages, focussing on tomorrow’s mountaintop finish at Courchevel, at velonews.com. I’m going to try to put a link in here, but I think Justine might have it set up where those don’t come through.
http://velonews.com/tour2005/news/articles/8466.0.html
Thanks for that, Christopher, obviously I’m hoping the second scenario will come true and Armstrong and his Discos are challenged, and challenged, and then challenged again.
Damn, I wish the coverage started early on weekdays too! You’re so lucky in Europe, Marrije, that you get such uninterrupted live coverage.
For the record it’s only if there are more than two links in a comment that it winds up in the moderating queue (that I always forget to check).
Any idea what cyclist’s do on “rest days”? Ride there bikes, for between about 20 to 40 miles. Funny eh?