Stage 19 Maubourguet Pays du Val d'Adour / Bergerac - Everything is Awesome

With the gruelling Pyrenees out of the way the peloton had a 208.5km ride on flat roads in beautiful south west France between Maubourguet Pays du Val d'Adour and Bergerac.

Now the Tour is nearing the end Gabriel Gate wanted to do something special for the riders and make good use of the local dry white wine Bergerac is famous for so he prepared Quail with Grapes and Chestnuts. 100ml of the wine went into the dish, the remainder into chef. The recipe calls for two big tablespoons of butter pushing the Beurremetric Counter through the 1kg barrier to weigh in at a thumping 1.12kg.

The peloton passed safely through the town of Condom but this race was by no means a dead rubber. Tour fans had waited patiently for nearly three weeks and Troll DJ finally delivered with the Les Vaches du Tour anthem ‘Cows with Guns’. The Twitterverse exploded in jubilation. AT LAST, COWS WITH GUNS!!! The Jaws theme montage of Asstana’s Vincenzo Nibali (his nickname is ‘The Shark’, get it?) was pretty good too. All we need to cap off the Tour is ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus.

Awesome

Beards have been quite the fashion this season and we’ve seen everything from the flavour saver to full on bushranger. Paul added that to grow a full set beard in the navy you’ve got to get permission from the captain. Well, that’s handy to know if you’re planning on joining the navy any time soon but utterly useless in the context of a bike race.

Apart from the Cows with Guns vaches montage our bovine friends were pretty thin on the ground when all of a sudden a real elephant appeared at the side of the road. I wonder if technically it passes as a vache? They are referred to as bulls and cows you know. Phil thought it might be a good time for a trunk call. Paul was worried about the elephant being poached. Not to worry Paul, we couldn’t find a saucepan big enough and besides I prefer my elephants fried. Phil and Paul thought the elephant was there because the circus was in town. Clearly it was not from the one in the commentary box.

Paul recalled how Andrew Talansky (Sharmin-Garp) nearly withdrew on the road earlier in the Tour. Talansky had stopped in front of the SAG wagon and the Directeur Sportif had to nurse him through the race to complete the stage. I don’t know about you but whenever I hear Paul talk of a directeur sportif nursing a rider through a stage I get a disturbing image of man boobs...

A scandal bigger then doping erupted during the stage. The Les Vaches du Tour team was excited by initial reports that came crackling in over race radio of vaches by the Chateau de Monbazillac. Eagle-eyed bovine spotters armed with high powered binoculars had their suspicions. FAKE VACHES! I just knew it! Those vaches by the chateau looked too perky and pert to be real.

Back to the race and it just wasn’t Marcel Kitteh’s (Giant-Shimano) day. First he had a puncture which Phil declared happened at best time. Phil, there’s NEVER a BEST time for a puncture, especially when you’ve left your repair kit at home and it’s a really long walk. Then Kitteh came down in a crash with Peter Sagan (Cannonball) and we believe with a gorilla that rides for Lotto-Belisol and goes by the name of Andre Griepel.

In the end Ramunas Navardauskas (Sharmin-Garp) prevailed. Earlier Troll DJ played the Lego Movie earworm ‘Everything is Awesome’ and everything turned out awesome for Navardauskas who notched up Lithuania’s first ever Tour stage victory.

Stage 12 Bourg-en-Bresse / Saint-Étienne

The Tour has passed the halfway mark but there’s still a long way to go. The stage 12 parcours from Bourg-en-Bresse to Saint-Étienne is very similar to stage 11 but different. For starters it’s in a different place with roads that take in the vineyards of the oh so pretty Beaujolais region. 

In the Tour caravan kitchen Gabriel Gate has been really hitting up on the desserts this year. And why not celebrate summer fruits in season by drowning them in a delightfully fruity Beaujolais from the vineyards of the region? The cherries are plump and plentiful so Gabs put wine and cherries together to create Cherry and Beaujolais Syrup with Almonds. No butter. The Beurremetric Counter is firmly stuck on 500g. Don’t tell us you’re on a health kick again Gabs?

After a week of freezing cold rain the riders have been hit with a sudden burst of summer heat. As the temperature rises so does the need for water for drinking and cooling off.

Forget the hoohah of experimenting with on board bike cameras, I reckon the next thing teams will be toying with is a helmet shower system. All they’d need is one of those Tinkie bottle vests with some plastic tubing, a small battery powered pump and a shower-head mounted on the helmet et voila, automatic cooling system. No need for riders to fumble with bidons as they try to squirt fluids over themselves.

An early prototype helmet shower system

Vineyards, chateaux and pretty churches. This stage had all the elements of an all inclusive Scenic Cruise on a bike package. Whether David de La Cruz (NetApp-Endura) was distracted by the sightseeing on his first Tour or his front wheel slipped out on the taffy like surface of the melting roads, he came a cropper on a bend and went out with a broken collar bone. Ouch.

Clarke, Clarkie, Sims, Simo, knackers, whatever you call that bloke from Orica-GreenWEDGE was out in front with the likes of Gotye (Oooooropcar) until hunger-flatting at 5km to go. 

The run home wasn’t without drama. Andre Greipel (Lotto-Belisol) and Sylvain Chavanel (IAM, YOUARE, WEARE Cycling) crashed and the Gorilla and Chava had words. 

In the final bunched sprint to the line Peter Sagan (Cannonball) was bridesmaid again pipped by Alexander Kristoff (Katusha). 

It would be amiss not to mention the terrible news of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 shot down over eastern Ukraine. Tweets reporting a crash of a Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine started to appear as the Tour stage was nearing its conclusion.

My initial reaction was to suspect a cruel hoax or a sick joke. Sadly the news turned out to be true and the cause of the crash, apparently from a surface to air missile, makes it even more horrifying.

These events are beyond words and sympathies go out to friends and families of the victims.

Stage 6 Arras / Reims - The Turn of the Screw

After yesterday’s epic battle on the cobbles, the Tour continued to pay tribute to the centenary of the beginning of World War I with a 194km stage from Arras through the Plains of the Somme and on to one of the champagne production centres of the region Reims. The terrain is pancake flat with just 2 category 4 climbs and an intermediate sprint at the 119km mark.

Since the race was heading to the Champagne region Gabriel Gate had something special planned, Chicken with Champagne and Mushroom Sauce. Not too many wild chickens in the north of France, so Gabs did what any one else would do and filled up a trolley down at the local supermarché. No butter in this recipe, the only dairy to speak of is a half cup of cream. However, what it lacks in dairy is more than made up for in booze with a little cognac and half a bottle of champagne for the dish and the rest for chef. The Beurremetric Counter sits on a tipsy 375g.

This route was designed with the sprinter in mind but not the Tour fan. Let’s be honest, this was a pretty boring stage on mostly flat fields with not a lot to see. Phil and Paul did manage to occupy themselves with some occasional  chateau and medieval ruin spotting but quickly got tired of it. And you know Paul is really bored when he starts talking about fishing. There were no bird spotting opportunities for Phil either. At times like this you wish Tour organisers would keep a buzzard on standby to release just to keep him occupied.

Boredom can be the enemy of the rider too leading to inattention. Conditions were moist but there were a lot of silly crashes on good straight roads resulting in more race abandons than on the cobbles the day before. Paul put it down to reactions to ‘strange noises’ causing riders to touch on the brakes and skid on the road. And the source of these strange noises? Well, Troll DJ gave us a clue with the theme to ‘Blazing Saddles’.

Speaking of wind, the cross winds over the fields caused some havoc in the peloton. And if cross winds weren’t enough, there were nine sectors of roundabouts to deal with on the run in to Reims.

Mega Farmer-Quick Stop ‘put the hammer down and turned up the screws’ in the final kilometres. ‘Hammers down’, ‘screws turned up’, classic  Sherwenisms. However, if these expressions are indicative of Paul’s handyman skills there’s no way I’m letting him do work around my chateau.

Marcel Kittel (Giant-Shimano) was highly fancied to win the stage and in the final sprint to the line punctured along with Trekie Danny Van Poppel, whose tyre, well, popped.  A repeat of stage 14’s ‘tackgate’ in 2012? No, it turns out the screws were turned up so high they fell out and ended up all over the road.

It was Andre Greipel’s (Lotto-Belisol) time to shine as he appeared out of nowhere to take the stage. Vincenzo Nibali (Asstana) hangs on to yellow and Peter Sagan (Cannonball) looked bored on the podium accepting another green jersey. Will we see him pop a wheelie on the line in Nancy?

Stage 3 Cambridge / Londres - London Calling

Day three and it’s the final stage on British soil before the Tour caravan crosses the English Channel for France. At 155km this ‘transitional stage’ is one of the shortest in this year’s Tour. The route was best described as pancake flat or at least considerably flatter than the so-called flat stage we saw in Yorkshire on Saturday. I always wonder about the phrase ‘pancake flat’. Obviously no one’s seen my attempts at making them.

In honour of the memory of the now defunct Euskaltel-Euskadi team, Gabriel Gate prepared a quintessential English dish of Steak and Kidney Casserole with Carrots. The absence of butter was a little disappointing and the Beurremetric Counter sits on 100g.

After a jaunt through the Essex countryside and with The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ blasting out over race radio, the peloton reached the edge of Greater London. By the time the riders hit the centre of London the race started to resemble more of a City Sightseeing bus stage than a transitional one.

Riders passed Olympic Park and Paul claimed to have met people who have actually swum in the pool of the Olympic Aquatic Centre. Well blow me down, we were all thinking it was only for show or frozen over for ‘Disney on Ice’ gigs on the school holidays.

The famous gherkin and City Hall ‘glass onion’ (or testicle, depending on your imagine) loomed into view before the peloton continued on past other landmarks such as the Tower Bridge and the Tower of London before a sprint on The Mall to the finish at Buckingham Palace.

Good thing the council put down that horse anti-slip coating for cavalry parades on The Mall because typical of London, it started to rain. So long as the riders could stay away from the ‘death-traps’ of white line markings and horse poo they knew that’d be safe.

Short of putting up dry stone wall barriers, not much could be done about  keeping spectators off the road. All it takes is one berk with a Brownie box camera to step out on the road and get clipped, which is exactly what happened at around 30km to go. David Lopez (Sky) sent the Brownie flying and several riders went down. Trekie Andy Schleck, some metres from the downed riders, insisted the spectator had nothing to do with his chute and that the bike inexplicably threw itself to the ground with him on it.

#selfie

  

Marcel Kittel (Giant-Shimano), Andre Greipel (Lotto-Belisol) and Peter Sagan (Cannonball) were all expected to duke it out on for line honours. Somewhere Greipel went missing in action and Kittel came thundering down The Mall like a Mack truck and was too good for Sagan by a bike length.

Vincenzo Nibali (Asstana) gets to wear yellow for the Tour’s resumption on French soil.

Stage 6 Aix-en-Provence / Montpellier – A state of nervousness

Today’s stage from Aix-en-Provence to Montpellier can be summed up in the words of Paul Sherwin as windy and nervous. These were about the only things on his mind today. For some such as Bouhanni (from French team All the Way with FDJ) it was all too much forcing an abandon of the great race.
 

It’s been five days of hard slog. You can forgive the riders for starting to find it just that little bit harder getting out of the cot in the morning. There’s nothing like a corpse-reviving-double-shot-strength espresso for petit déjeuner to get you going for the day.

All that coffee may explain (or perhaps the lack of butter in Gabriel Gate’s Salade de Cerises au Marc de Languedoc or cherry fruit salad with Languedoc brandy) all that nervous energy in the peloton as they took to a blustery parcours that skirts the Camargue which, as Phil Liggett loves to point out, is famous for its wild horses and pink flamingos.

 

 

 

A famous pink flamingo

 

The peloton gallantly fought the cross winds employing the oldest survival tactic in the book, the echelon. The Dutch and Belgians are very good at this riding technique coming from the flat empty wind swept lands of the north. What the wind was cross about was never determined. Did it get up on the wrong side of the bed? Or perhaps it was just nervous and nervous wind is the worst kind of wind.

But the nervousness didn’t end there. The fields and limestone outcrops looked nervous. Even the acrobatic Camargue bulls, smaller than their Spanish cousins, looked nervous.

We finally put the finger on the cause of this universal state of nervousness. It was Paul’s endless descriptions of nervousness that got on everyone’s nerves in the end.

However, the nerves soon evaporated at dash for the finish line in Montpellier. I suspect some riders may have discarded the cherries from Gabriel's special treat and stashed the brandy in their bidons for the run home.

The finish saw Greipel and Sagan skittle Kittel. Lady luck continues to smile for Orica-GreenWEDGE with the team's Daryl Impey becoming the first African to slip on yellow. We won’t hear the end of it from the Ps now...

Now that we are at the gateway to le weekend, I’ll leave you with a Friday fun fact; Did you know there’s a large urban habitation dedicated to making energy drinks for riders? It’s called the For Bidon City.