It's July, and that means it's time for the Tour de France! It's shaping up to be a good race and I can't wait to see how it all unfolds over the next 3 weeks. I brought in a satellite receiver to hook up to the TV at work so I could watch the stage finishes. I like to think it's helps my productivity. :) Plus it keeps me from burning bandwidth at work by watching online video streams.
If you've ever wanted to know about cycling (and stage races), now is a great time to watch the Tour. With Lance Armstrong racing again, the people at Versus know there are a lot of new viewers and they spend more time than usual explaining things (at least in these opening stages). And if you've got some more questions, you can fire them off to me.
Yesterday's stage was surprisingly interesting. It should have been a pretty straightforward stage with a sprint finish. Instead, one team (Columbia) caused a split in the group when they came into a crosswind. It was great to watch it all unfold. They lined up all of their guys on the front and formed an echelon that was just big enough for their team, leaving everyone else to suffer in the wind. (An echelon is a way of riding in a crosswind that allows riders to "hide" from the wind while one person takes most of it. It looks like a paceline that's been blown sideways.) The result was that all of the overall favorites (except Armstrong) lost time and Columbia's sprinter won the stage.
We have a shortwave receiver. There MUST be some HAM geek out there broadcasting Tour de France updates and how great of a clause would it be to say "While I was listening to the Tour on Single Side Band on a sailboat, ..."
ReplyDeleteGoogle it my friend.