Skip to main content

Racing News - Thursday, September 13th

Vuelta de Espana - Stage 12:
Alessandro Pettachi gets another stage win, narrowly edging out Danielle Bennati at the final sprint.

Once again, no change at the top of the G.C. Denis Menchov holds on to the golden jersey, and leads Vladimmir Efimkin by a little more than 2 minutes. Despite Pettachi's two wins, he still sits in 135th place, almost an hour and a half off of the lead.

Tour of Missouri - Stage 2:
There was a wreck early in the stage when Dan Schmatz of the BMC team seemingly hit an armadillo and went down hard.

At the 50km, a breakaway group of 12 riders pulled away from the peloton, with at least one rider from every team represented. They only maintained a 30 second lead at first, but it grew to 7 minutes, and then 11 minutes.

George Hincapie took both of the intermediate sprints, but was closely challenged by Domonique Rollin each time.

With 85 km to go, the gap had opened up to 17 minutes. DFL-Cyclingnews-Litespeed made the initial moves to reel in the break, but the Discovery Channel team kept them in check.

On the final circuit the breakaway mainly stuck together, but their were attacks from Will Frischkorn, Friedman and CaƱada. Friedman had the lead 200m from the finish, but Hincapie attacked with 50m to go and took the stage.

Hincapie goes to the top of the G.C. with Frank Pipp and Domonique Rollin close on his heels. The amazing part is that he has over a 14 minute lead on the bulk of the remaining riders.

Tour of Poland - Stage 5:
Murilo Fischer of Liquigas wins today's stage. Danilo Napolitano has the overall lead, but Fischer is only a second behind.

Tour de l'Avenir - Stage 8:
Nicholas Hartmann of the French National Team wins today after a 129 km breakaway with Jose Herrada of Spain (who takes second place). The French National team is atop the team classification and Bauke Mollena of the Dutch National Team leads the G.C.

Other News:
  • Tom Boonen is still hurting after his crash in Stage 4 of the Vuelta
  • Lance Armstrong's "Tour of Courage" comes to Vancouver next week.
  • Stephen Cummings, another of Discovery Channel's little lost lambs, will be moving to the Barloworld team next year.
  • Slipstream/Chipotle is holding a contest in which you can design their jersey for next year.
  • Andreas Kloeden has dropped out of the German National Team for the Worlds', citing injury.
  • A spokesman for the Bonn, German prosecutor's office says that Jan Ullrich transferred money to Dr. Fuentes, the physician at the head of the Operation Puerto scandal, in early 2004.

Popular posts from this blog

Racing News - Friday September 21st

Stage 18 : Luis Perez Rodriguez goes out with a bang, closing out his 13 year career with a stage win in his home country.  4 riders dropped out before the start of Thursday's, the most notable of which was World Chamion Paolo Bettini. 24 riders tried to make an early escape today, but were captured by the peloton at 40km. Soon after, another group of 19 riders broke away. Even that group splintered, and we ended up with a group of 12, consisting of chasers and breakers at the 56km mark. Some of the notable names in the break were Menchov, Sastre, Evans, Sanchez and Mosquera. Chasing closely behind (38 seconds back at 76km) was a 10 man group containing Efimkin and others.  At 93km, the second group was caught be the peloton, while the leaders extended their advantage to 2 minutes and 45 seconds. The leaders cooperated well over the final climb and kept their lead. With 13km to go, Rodriguez put the hammer down and quickly pulled out to a 26 second lead. He managed to keep ahead al...

Landis at the Shenandoah Mountain 100

Some of you probably took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to take a long bike ride (not me, I had a nasty cold).  Floyd Landis took a long ride, too, participating in the Shenandoah Moutain 100 .  Reports are that he got to the race early, hung out with the locals , chewed the fat , had some beer and signed some autographs. He hung around after the race as well. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, he got third place in a very tough race.  I have to agree with Harlan Price (who took 2nd place at the SM100) that Floyd must love the sport if he keeps showing up at events like Leadville and Shenanhoah Mountain. Maybe he picks up a little bit of press coverage, but these are fringe events that the mainstream media largely ignore. Some may say that he is schmoozing fans, but that's not going to help his trial end in his favor.  Sounds to me like he's just an ordinary guy who loves to ride hard and party hard afterwards. He hasn't gone into hiding, he's up front,...

Tour de France - Stage 19 Results

The day started with rumors of yet another positive doping test, but the 11 a.m. conference at which the offending rider was to be announced passed without any mention of it. American Levi Leipheimer put in a blazing performance in today's individual time trial to come within 31 seconds of the yellow jersey. Still, he remains in 3rd, behind teammate Alberto Contador and Australian Cadel Evans. Today's Results: 1. Leipheimer 2. Evans 3. Karpets 4. Popovych 5. Contador General Classification 1. Contador 2. Evans (:23) 3. Leipheimer (:31) 4. Sastre (7:08) Sunday's race is traditionally a parade into Paris, but with talks of a rider protest against doping tomorrow, whether the riders hold to tradition is anyone's guess.