LOOK 2,000

With today's ride I climbed the LOOK over the 2,000 miles this bike this year barrier. The mileage ridden on this bicycle is ever so gradually creeping up to the total mileage combined on the second and third most ridden bicycles in my stable. I may not every reach THAT threshold. I don't think I will actually make it this year and it is my current intention to bring the Crown Jewel back out to play as soon as the LOOK reaches 14,000.

I rode in mid-afternoon today. The sun almost directly overhead seemed to keep racer boy inside so it was mostly a pretty nice ride. Except for the 40ish helmetless guy on a comfort bike who latched onto my rear wheel near Summit and Fairview and seemed determined to hang there as I rode leisurely up Summit towards the Cathedral. I could hear him back there clicking through his gears on every slight uphill.

Finally at the corner of Dale he decided that he had won the race and he cast a triumphant sideways glance at me as he rolled by on the right while I waited for the light to change.

Those of you who watched the end of Stage 19 can visualize what happened next. I assumed the role of Chavanel of Cofidis, he was Roy of Francaise de Jeux. It is downhill away from Dale and I rolled up onto his rear wheel, finding as I did the gear that I wanted for what was coming next. The street turns back uphill and racerman started clicking his gears again. As soon as he was in a gear in which he could not accelerate I took advantage of being in a gear in which I could accelerate, and did so.

These little victories are so puny, I feel ashamed and diminished to have taken such glee in blowing his fenders off.

A bit further along I detoured into the parking lot at the big church to get both of our city's big stone buildings into a single photograph.We watched the time trial this morning. I love le Tour, it is such great scenery. And it is a great athletic show. But it isn't clean yet, not by a whole bunch. That Schumacher guy, he just doesn't look right to me. The Gerolsteiner team in general, Schumacher, Lang, Kohl, they just don't look right to me. The Schleck frères don't look right to me. Sastre? Another Spanish climber having the time trial of his life just in time to win le Tour? It just doesn't look right to me.

Le Tour did not invite Team Astana this year as a way of making a statement against doping. Astana insisted that they are clean, that only the sponsor is the same, that team management and all of the riders are changed from old Astana, and that leaving them out deprived the race of its defending champion. I think that I have already expressed my personal belief that the defending champion has some explaining to do before we accept that he rides without the aid of pharmaceuticals. Race organizers apparently feel the same and they held firm, deciding that they have already had enough Astana drug scandals, thank you.

Today, just in time for the final stage of the Tour, Astana announced that they have fired a team member. The announcement seems to be some sort of bid to be seen as a team that is clean, a team that is ridding themselves of dopers from within. But what strikes me as high irony is that if Astana had been invited to the race, the announcement today would be that they were throwing an Astana rider out of the Tour and the Tour would have had an Astana doping incident for its third year in a row.

I do not believe the Tour is clean.