Stage 1--Gioia report

Absoultely, it's a huge loss to see that massive pile-up at the end of stage 1. Two podium contenders are gone. Rabobank lost two riders and we've yet to get to the team time trial. I feel worst for Hamilton. He planned his whole year around this race, and now it's done in one day because of the stupidity of others.

As for the tricky corner, there have always been corners near the ends of stages. It would be hard to design a course without any. That said, I'll take the riders' words for it when they say it was egregious. But what about the guy who started it? Kelme has no business being near the front of a sprint finish. Sending a Kelme rider into the top 25 places at the sprint is like sending your fullback to catch a Hail Mary pass.

Other notes:
1)NO ONE is having a better year than Alessandro Petacchi!
2) Telekom was awesome in getting Zabel back into the peloton after he had a puncture 10km from the finish.
3) Fassa Bortolo (Fast Bordello) did a great job pacing the peloton back to the breakaway and again in leading out Petacchi.
4) USPS is first in the team competition. It's early, but not meaningless. Their aiming to get a prime starting position for Wednesday's time trial.
5) Once again, Christophe Mengin (FDJeux) has taken the pre-mountain King of the Mountains Jersey. When the race goes from hills to mountains a real climber will take it from him. In the meantime, he earns his team money for each day he's got the lead. FDJeux is keeping two of the four leaders' jerseys warm until the contenders rise up.

And just in case you needed another reason to hate the TdF organizers...

Tour de France chief Jean-Marie Leblanc admitted Friday that organizers of this year's race had been duped into reaching agreement with Batasuna, the banned political wing of the armed Basque separatist group ETA, to allow the 16th stage between Pau and Bayonne in southwestern France to be conducted bilingually. "We were conned, tricked," claimed Leblanc on the eve of the start of the centenary Tour.

Good job, you freakin' clod. Why not get al Qaeda, Hizbullah, the IRA, the PLO, and FARC to sponsor other TdF sites. Better yet, see if you can get Zacharias Mussaoui rather than Bernard Hinault to shake hands with the winners. But there is more entertainment here...

Tour of Spain director Enrique Franco slammed the move as "a serious blunder".

I think it's great that a man named Franco runs the Vuelta. The Basques can't be happy with that. But we've got to go back to Leblanc for the best quote.

"I can't imagine that an elected representative could have links with a criminal organization," he said.

What planet are you from, man?

Getting back to the seminal stupidity of the matter, why is it such an ordeal to get a bilingual event? Why should it be such a problem to have someone speak in the Basque language when the Tour rides into a Basque town and is patronized by Basque people? Why does Leblanc have to go through special channels to get an Euskara speaker? Is it because the TdF won't allow it without the proper 'donation' from the town?

Jean-Marie Leblanc is a moron!