Tour de Fr., 9me etape

Hello to All Seven of You

One nice thing about my current job is the fact that I am done with work by nine a.m. and can scoot home in time to watch the Tour coverage on tv. I´m always in time to get the last 45 km of live racing from the highways and byways of good old France, with somewhat clueless Hispanic announcers yammering on.

Today was a sprinter´s stage, the last before the Pyranees (I think its the P´s), ending in the city of Dax, wherever that is. It was an awesome bunch sprint yet again with McKewen losing to the great Oscar Freire of Spain by less than half a wheel, with my man Zabel ripping up the inside line and past Tom Boonen no less to take third, his best finish yet this Tour. The way Zabel just keeps going at it, years after his peak, still giving everything against the world´s best never ceases to inspire me. I know he just wants one more stage win in the Tour so much. He´s got more victories than anyone else in the peloton, won the Tour´s Green Jersey six times over but he´s still totally hungry and won´t give up at thirty-five.

Zabel wasn´t even supposed to get much of a chance in the Tour with this new Milram team, as they had signed the superfast sprinter Alessandro Petacchi and the team would have been working for Ale-Jet had he not broken his kneecap in the Giro. So after the snub of not being picked for T-Mobile´s Tour squad last year after thirteen years with them, Zabel is back in action, always getting top ten finishes in the opening week´s sprinting stages.

I really needed to get that off my chest, I don´t care how irrelevant it is to any of you. I actually got to see my man Zabel in action at the World´s in Verona, Italy in 2004, if only briefly. It was the final, excruciating lap, and I had spent the previous forty-five minutes of the six-and-a-half hour race climbing the mountainous part of the course. Finally the front end of the race showed up and there was Zabel in first place, just giving it with full force in the heat of the 16th lap. To see a pure sprinter hammering up a mountain like that after 240+ km and in October no less (after eight months of racing), was really amazing. Of course, Freire beat him in the sprint and Zabel had to live with second, tears streaming down his face after a final furious effort over the cobblestones. It was particularly frustrating for Zabel because a) in the World´s your team is ill-practiced and the race is so long and difficult that making your move at the right time without something going wrong is hard enough, and b) Freire had beat him that spring right at the line in San Remo at the longest one-day race of the year.

It had been a spectacular fiasco for such a seasoned sprinting pro, that loss in Milano-San Remo, because Zabel (who´s won that race four times) went into the victory salute five metres from the line, not realizing that Freire was about to explode past him, which of course he did to Zabel´s eternal humiliation. Much later he said, ¨I didn´t see him there, I didn´t hear him, I didn´t feel him there¨.

Freire, who´s won three world championships, is a specialist at the long-range one day race with the possibly the best punchout speed in the final metres of a bunch sprint. It was his second stage win of this Tour, and it was typically amazing. Freire just exploding forwards and even the Aussie pocketrocket himself, Robbie McKuwen couldn´t reel him in despite his typical last-ditch move to leftwards off somebody else´s wheel. Robbie, who´d won three of the first eight stages (which is incredibly dominant), immediately gave Freire the congratulatory slap on the back after almost sideswiping him at 70km/hour. Ahh, biking racing...