Thanks for flying the DeFeet flag in yellow, Linus.

Oh la la.. there was a lot of urgency, today. There was about a French farmer-sized tractorload of carnage, too. Yesterday I had to coin Michael Rasmussen 'Tinkerbell', because his secret was out. I saw his wings. It looked like he cast a spell on the field when he made his initial move, today, because they let him ride away like he was invisible. The peleton was wide across the road, when he left them. It was not crunch time, but rather a lull after after an extended period of hard riding. Perhaps they knew he would leave them, eventually, anyway. Peter Pan was Ok, today, but he can't let this happen, again.

We bid farewell to Michael Rodgers, who made one of the fastests moves from 'Yellow Jersey on-the-road-to-abandonment' in the history of the Tour. We salute Linus Gerdemann, who survives within reach of yellow, but will lose too much time before the first individual time trial to reclaim the Maillot Jaune.

My friend Carl Decker included these truthsome words in a letter to his sponsors, today. I found them entertaining and wanted to share them here:

"AC (Carl's teammate on Giant, Adam Craig) and I may have invented the term "Lemming Line". The Lemming Line is the uninventive race line. Send 500 experts, sports and pro's down a trail and the Lemming Line will be burned into the trail in the form of tracks, trampled grass, and rutted sand. Everyone rides the Lemming Line. Often the LL is slow. Unfortunately for them, Lemmings will follow that same damn line in the sand every time. Straight to their demise. They can't help it. They are Lemmings.

The best riders will see the fastest line through all the Lemmings' tracks. This is what we will call "The Race Line". A faster, smoother, shorter line. Half the fun of racing Mountain Bikes is finding those better lines, and both Adam and I pride ourselves on finding that extra second here and there on the track.

Most Road Racers do not share this pride of Linesmanship. The all important Draft tosses all sense of cornering geometry out the window. Outside-Inside-Outside on the corners, you ask? No no no. Not if you want to stay in the draft and in the good graces of the pack. Instead you "hold your line" which means follow the dodgy dude in front of you. Vary from this MO and you will get yelled at, and possibly branded "sketchy" or, even worse (to roadies) "unprofessional". It's the nature of the racing that dictates the Lemming Nature of the Roadie. Nowhere is this more obvious than in that great American institution, the Criterium."

Well put, Carl. Carl went on to describe how his face got pounded in the pavement by lemmings during a criterium, this week. I echo Carl's sentiments. Most road racers, even professionals, do not always excersise very good 'linesmanship'. In the Tour, today, you could tell that the corners leading up to where Michael Rodgers crashed and the Spaniard flew over the rail, were a little tricky (and steeper) in their setup. Screw up one of those and you can't borrow enough road on the following corner. I'm sure Carl wouldn't have had any problems sluicing through there.