What a fantastic renaissance year for the tour!! Weeding the cheaters out early, allowing for fantastic breakthrough rides and intense days through the mountains!

Congrats to Carlos! And don't forget about America's new hope, Christian Vandevelde. Can't wait to see his improvement to the podium next year!

Best tour in years! The fans, riders and teams are taking it back!

Cadel's biggest problem is that he was on a team who wanted to win the 'champagne' Tour with a 'beer' budget. Plus, the one guy for whom they did cough up the bucks to help Cadel was NOWHERE to be seen in the mountains. Except on a Stage 16 breakaway & yeah, often you send a guy in a break to be ahead on the mountain to help your real GC guy when he gets there. But on a stage with a long DOWNHILL finish? The freakin DAY BEFORE ALPE D'HUEZ?! What Einstein on SLotto thought THAT was a good plan?!

I started watching this year's Tour not being a fan of Cadel Evans. In fact, after his whining last year about his team, when he HAD Horner with him at least half way up most of the mountains, I didn't like him much at all. And I suppose if I was a member of the press trying to get access & my daily quota of quotes, maybe I still wouldn't like him. But, I'm NOT a journo. And thanks to the internet with access to multiple video & 'print' sources, I've now seen & read with my own eyes how these journos distort the "truth" for whatever misleading point they are trying to shove at their readers. And unlike yourself, they don't have the guts to do it where their readers can write them back. Anyway, after watching Cadel both on & off the bike at this year's Tour, I feel disappointment. Not IN him but FOR him. If there'd been a Prologue & a regular length TT before the Alps, there would definitely have been a different podium on Sunday. Plus, I don't know of any other rider (actually IN the race) who could have fended off the three-headed monster of CSC on every mountain stage and STILL be so close to winning it. If Cadel had ridden the final TT he's capable, he would have won. But, CSC, the TEAM, not Sastre, wore him down. And despite the unbelievable fact that Cadel's most helpful teammate was a SPRINTER - Rocket Robbie ( !), & that he was bombarded & harassed every minute he was off the bike with questions about his weak, sucko team, until the last few days he answered those questions by commending the support the team were giving him & not what they weren't. The fact is that his team was WEAK compared to Garmin let alone CSC. And UNLIKE last year, I heard no whining about it. But I DID see journos distort his answer to the question. As much as doping is "cheating", so is the reprehensible distortion of facts by so called journalists. (Just to be clear, I'm not referring to you, Bruce or Frankie!)

As for CSC, Riis merely continued the tactics that Johan put in motion last year - have 2 (or more) GC contenders on a team & on the mountains together to attack &/or defend against the rivals. But Riis did even better by having The Three Horsemen as domestiques - Stuey 'Seabiscuit' O'Grady, Fabian 'Secretariat' Cancellara, & Jens 'Man O'War' Voight. With these guys AND three 'mountain men', if CSC had actually lost the Tour (& they ALMOST did!), it would have been a MUCH bigger failure than Cadel's.

I do agree that the Tour was extremely exciting but unlike yourself, am not thrilled with the final podium placements. Plus, that Astana was egregiously barred the same year that confessed Tour doper Riis was not only allowed back at the race but whose team won the thing, makes me ill.