Armstrong loses Tour de France

I had a collision with a butterfly today. This is a lot more uncommon than you might think. My usual bicycling insect moments involve taking something large and hard off the sunglasses. That happens more often than you might think.

Today the flight of a butterfly intersected with my upper arm. It was a gentle collision and an interesting sensation. The flutterby fluttered there for a few moments, tickling my bicep and then departed the area, apparently no worse for the contact.

I rode after today's Tour de France stage and before the World Cup semi-final. I mentioned when I pictured the rooster from this yard that there is a lot of other lawn ornamentation in the yard. Here is an Easter Island sort of double concrete sculpture.Note that there are also metal sculptures on the blocks above each of the heads.

Paul and Phil said a couple of days ago that you could not win the Tour de France in these early northern stages but that you could lose it. Today I suspect that Armstrong lost his best chance to win. And the instrumentality of his loss was:

A flat tire.

Lance's hope for these early stages was to get a lead on Contador. The circumstances of today's stages looked as though it such a hope was not unreasonable. However, the group that Armstrong was with after Frank Schleck's fall fractured the peloton contained no teammates and no other strong men that he could join with to try to get his group back into contact with the Cancellara led elite group at the front. In fact, his group could not even stay clear of the Vinokourov led next group which, unfortunately for Lance, included Contador. The Versus coverage had a helicopter shot of the moment when those two groups were rejoined. Completely missed by the coverage team but visible on screen was the moment when Lance pulled over, hand in the air, a clear sign of a flat tire. He looked towards the back for a teammate or the team car. Neither came in time and Vino and Alberto surged away. Armstrong was never able to reestablish contact.

Armstrong trails Contador by 50 seconds. Anybody have any idea where he can make up that amount of time? Mountains? Time trial?

I think that the winner now is likely to come from the trio of Evans, Contador and Andy Schleck. My prerace predicted winner remains alive. Somewhat unlike the success of my predictions in the World Cup.

Today's mileage: 27.09. The arithmetic should be obvious.