tdf stage 3 - insane!

So the culprit yesterday was Eric Zabel (a sprinter). He clipped the bike in front of him, came out of his pedal as he tried to balance himself, swung hard right on the road, and clipped the front wheel of the rider behind him as he swung across. That rider went down and caused the pile up. Zabel didn't fall.

Here's a video of the crash. It's a ways in. Watch at 2 minutes. You'll notice the white shirted rider (Zabel) swing right.


The only obvious casualty (out of the tour) was Tomas Vaitkus of Discovery with 5 fractures in his hand.

I love how they have rider biometric stats on Versus. I'm watching Van Velde riding along at an 'easy pace' kicking out 220 Watts of energy. That's so disturbing to me because my indoor trainer has a power meter and kicking out 220 Watts for any extended period of time is anything but an easy pace. 160 Watts will have me sweating profusely after 30 minutes. Armstrong, as with other top riders, can kick out 500 Watts for 30 minutes. Maintaining 500 Watts for a minute would be a heavy task for most people. Some wouldn't even be able to crank out 500 Watts at all.

Btw, Link to Versus streaming video. This link is impossible to find on the Versus site.

Stage 3 is the longest stage of the tour and it was another great stage. A breakaway made it out early and hung on towards the end. The question in the last 3 miles was if the peloton was going to catch the 4 lead riders or not. It was really close all the way down to the end. There were some amazing aerial shots of the 4 riders being chased by the huge and fast moving peloton.

At 3km to go the peloton was 27 seconds down.

But it just didn't seem like they could catch the 4 riders. Really ballsy riding by the four riders - Willems, Auge, Vogondy, and Ladagnous.

And then out of nowhere the peloton surged and caught up and out of the front of the peloton came Cancellara, the current maillot jaune! The guys not even a sprinter. So he jumped early and built a small lead off of the peloton. The sprinters then pushed (Zabel, Boonen, McEwen) to take the lead off Cancellara and they CAN'T do it! Cancellara takes the sprint. Unreal.