tdf - stage 7

Well that was interesting. Serhiy Honchar (T-Mobile) takes the stage by a wide margin (1 minute) and the yellow jersey. Who? Yea that's what I said. Apparently he was a world time trial champion in 2000. He is not, from what I can gather, expected to do well in the mountains.

Landis has a good time and came in second. That was with a punctured tire cracked handlebar. He's looking damn good here in 2nd place. I can't wait to see him in the mountains. Lang was third.

Salvodelli, Hincapie, Popovych from Discovery had disappointing times. Leipheimer's time was abysmal. Something was wrong there. Maybe he's sick. And Julich (another American) crashed out and was hauled off in an ambulance. Zabriskie (another American and one expected to do well) also had a bad day. So all in all two of the teams expected to excel in the time trial, Discovery and CSC, did poorly. T-Mobile did well. They have 4 riders in the top ten GC. One wonders what this would all be like if Ullrich was riding.

So here's the general classification after 7 stages:

Serhiy Honchar (Ukr) T-Mobile Team
Floyd Landis (USA) Phonak Hearing Systems - 1'00"
Michael Rogers (Aus) T-Mobile Team - at 1'08"
Patrik Sinkewitz (Ger) T-Mobile Team - at 1'45"
Marcus Fothen (Ger) Gerolsteiner - at 1'50"
Andreas Kloden (Ger) T-Mobile Team - same time
Vladimir Karpets (Rus) Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears - at 1'52"
Cadel Evans (Aus) Davitamon-Lotto - same time
Denis Menchov (Rus) Rabobank - at 2'00"
David Zabriskie (USA) Team CSC - at 2'02"

Landis, Kloden, Karpets (won best young rider award 2 years ago), and Evans look interesting here. We'll really have to see how these guys perform in the mountains. This is getting interesting.

Another thought. I'm almost glad Armstrong isn't riding this year because he would have just decimated this field. It would have been so overwhelming that there would have been little suspense.