Quote:
The Discovery Channel team has set the fastest average speed for a team time trial in the Tour de France. The nine riders finished the 67.5km course in one hour, 10 minutes and 39 seconds. The average speed is 57.31km/h - eclipsing the previous best (that of Gewiss-Ballan from 1995 - 54.930km/h).
Dave Zabriskie has lost his yellow jersey in dramatic fashion. It’s hard to say what caused his crash but he has lost a lot of skin because of the accident.
Lance Armstrong will wear the yellow jersey in stage five. He leads George Hincapie by 55" and Jens Voigt by 1’04".
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LA getting the yellow today was expected, as Team Postal / Discovery Channel has always been very strong in the Team TT event. Even with losing Ekimov, a TT and pursuit specialist, they still have an extremely strong TT tandem in LA and George Hincapie to pace the train. These guys probably did the lions share of the pulling in front today.
As for Dave Zabriskie & team CSC, that's just bad luck, and you have to feel for the kid. Obviously, a rookie mistake, and perhaps a lack of focus, touching wheels with only 1.2 KM to go. It'll be interesting to watch the highlights tonight.
Because Zabriskie was the last rider to pull in on his team, his time didn't affect the overall team time (I believe they count the first 6 riders for the team time, then the stragglers keep their deficits...by memory). His team pulled in only 2 seconds of Discovery's pace, so had Zabriskie not done his best imitation of a human crayon, he and LA would have been sharing Mellow Johnny (easy Dap, those are metaphors), if they didn't go to split seconds.
Although I still stand by the notion that Zabriskie would have eventually fallen off the pace in the hills, he did have a strong enough team to get him to the mountains wearing yellow.
Discovery will now likely control and maintain a high pace of the next few stages to discourage any surprise attacks (certainly possible in stages 8 & 9, with several 2 & 1 category climbs), and position Lance for an assault on stage 11, the toughest with TWO HC (out of category) climbs. This is where we will find out if there are any snakes in the grass that can pull off the unexpected and unimaginable: put time into Armstrong.