So the Manxman has crossed the line first for the forth time. Well done young man!! The problem is I was just as excited about Ricco's winning, the way he tore through the field on Super Besse was amazing. The reason I watch the Tour is that there will be days where you'll see pure brilliance on the bike(unlike the last two days of boring racing save for the whirlwind from the Isle of Mann sweeping through). I so dearly want to get behind Cav but I'm now held back by the fact fact that we may just have another scandal breakout. I can guarantee you the French Anti-doping agency is screening his blood through every conceivable test as they try to find something floating around that may be on the banned substances list. This is the sad fact of these idiots have placed the cycling world in. I'm relatively new to this but it really wasn't shocking to see these positives come back, I mean I've only been able to witness a scandalous Tour. The only time I can watch epic racing is to take a trip back in time and watch how the boys of old got their rocks off.I must say that I can't wait for the mountains to start again. Watching two lone riders try to fight a peleton just isn't as exciting as it panned out to be. The only reason I stayed tuned is for the commentary and cool graphics they spit out every now and then. So I decided to make one of my own. If there was another jersey to be added based on place finishes then who do you think would be up there. Before i post my results I'll give a run down of what I did. I sat on the couch wondering if you took the finishing places on each day and added them up who would have the best points, by this I mean the least amount of points purely based on finishing place. this calculation spat out the following:
| Kim Kirchen | 174 |
| Cadel Evans | 231 |
| Angel Gomez | 247 |
| Manuel Beltran Martinez | 278 |
| Christian Vande Velde | 315 |
| Stefan Schumacher | 371 |
| Oscar Pereiro Sio | 374 |
| Denis Menchov | 376 |
| Erik Zabel | 386 |
| Vladimir Efimkin | 387 |
I can't say I'm a huge Evans fan purely becasue he is not exciting. My mind however has been changed after seeing him put in a few digs the other day and now viewing this graph it shows that he is not just finishing in the peleton but actually placing pretty high. Obviously the climbers suffer on the sprint stages but I'm sure its pretty much the same way around for the sprinters in the mountains. I'll try keep the table updated for the rest of the Tour. SO I'm now whole heartedly behind the squeaking Aussie. The main reason being his mountain bike background so I guess I have no choice.
