Tour de France - Stage 10

“Versus” TV schedule:

Stage 10: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Tallard to Marseille
8:30am to 11:30am: LIVE Daily Coverage
12:00pm to 2:00pm: Race Action Replay
2:30pm to 4:30pm: Race Action Replay
5:00pm to 7:00pm: Race Action Replay
8:00pm to 11:00pm: Expanded Primetime Coverage
12:00am to 3:00am: Race Action Replay

From cyclingnews.com this am:

(By Tim Maloney, European Editor)
After the final Alpine effort, stage 10 heads south from Tallard, just south of Gap through the Alpes de Haute Provence to the port city of Marseille and opportunistic riders who are looking for a result will certainly be on the attack. The two Cat. 3 climbs, Bastides and Gineste in the final 30 kilometres will be decisive in determining who gets the winners big bowl of bouillabaisse for the stage that finishes in front of Marseille's Stade Vélodrome.

Climbs:

Km 57: Côte de Châteauneuf-Val-Saint Donat: 3.3 km climb to 3.1 % / 4th Cat.
Km 93: Côte de Villedieu: 1.1 km climb @ 5.2 % grade / 4th Cat.
Km 201.5: Côte des Bastides: 7.5 km climb @ 2.9 % grade / 3rd Cat.
Km 219.5: Col de la Gineste: 7.5 km climb @ 3.2 % grade / 3rd Cat.
Sprints:
Km 82.5: Oraison
Km 154.5: Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume

As Thor Hushovd said yesterday with a sigh of relief: Au revoir, Alpes. We are heading down to the Mediterranean today. 229.5 long kilometres from Tallard to Marseille, the port city in Southern France. The sprinters have acknowledged that it is unlikely to be a sprint finish, as a small group is expected to get away.....

And more doping news for the day. Patrik Sinkewitz, who collided with a spectator a couple of days ago, tested positive. The T-Mobile rider's A probe was tested positive for Testosterone and the German has been suspended from T-Mobile immediately.

I hope they aren't using the same lab that threw the black cloud over Floyd Landis.

Wondering the same thing too.

Here's the story, but doesn't mention if the lab was Chatenay-Malabry.

Even the French Open abandoned that lab for irregularities.

For the life of me, I can't see why TDF sticks with them unless the owner is somebody's brother-in-law or something.

Maybe not. From cycling news:

The team contributes a substantial sum [believed to be in hundreds of thousands of euro] to the German NADA and this facilitates the regular testing of its riders by them. It would appear that this was the test which led to the adverse finding for Sinkewitz. (emph mine)

Sinkewitz

Either these lab tests are incredibly unreliable, or cyclists are incredibly stupid. Last year, I had a hard time believing that Landis would try to cheat while standing in the full glare of the TDF spotlight, and now I have a hard time believing that Sinkewitz would try the same thing after what's transpired with Landis/Basso/Ulrich/Riis/Zabel over the last 11 months. It doesn't make any sense.

I'm beginning to believe that "everyone does it" might actually be the case, and that they've developed elaborate masking techniques which enable most riders to escape detection most of the time. That would perhaps justify their belief that they aren't cheating, because if everyone does it, there's no advantage. It's like holding by football offensive linemen - it's a penalty, but everyone does it, so the trick is to just not be too obvious about it.

T-Mobile was the team that tried more than anyone to clean house and implement a strong anti-doping program. All winter long, the cycling magazines were touting them and contrasting them with Disco, which had just signed Basso despite allegations of doping. So that makes the Sinkewitz thing even more bizarre.

Even more bizarre is that every T-Mo rider had to sign the contract that they’d forfeit ALL of their racing income for the year if they were caught doping. I thought that clause might turn out to be a pretty clever gambit, because it would take away a lot of the incentive for these guys to cheat. Guess not. (caveat: he’s innocent until proven guilty by the “B”)

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