It’s rare that you work through an upgrade that goes exactly as stated in the documentation. But that’s what just happened with my most recent Wordpress upgrade. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since in the year or so of running this site on Wordpress the worst problems I’ve had could be classified as only “minor annoyances”. All these years in IT have taught me to be a little cautious though, so I waited about two months before pushing the upgrade out….well, to be honest it probably had a little more to do with my procrastination than any desire to be cautious, but the former sounds so much better.

So I’m up and happy on 2.0.3, and all my plugins seem to still be working - this final post through Ecto will validate that everything is well and truly happy. Kudos to the Wordpress team on an excellent product….

Well, has been a while since the last update, but things have been busy. Alex finished up his first year of kid pitch baseball, I had a few trips to make for work, there’s been a few fishing trips with Alex, and a whole smattering of the normal work around the house and yard.

But that only accounts for part of the lag - you see, the last three weeks I’ve been suffering from a bit of a bout with Tour fever. Frequent readers (please - let me pretend like some exist, it does wonders for my sense of self worth) know that this has become an annual thing for me over the past 5 years. Beth has gotten hooked (thought not as bad), and will sit down with me and watch large parts of the race or at the very least will ask how things are going when she pokes her head downstairs in the morning. This year Alex actually sat down with us for parts of the race and learned new terms like “peloton”, “domestique”, and the meaning of the various colored jerseys.

I had plans to post a note on Le Tour before it started, or at the very least during the first week but that obviously didn’t happen. Part of the reason was my normal laziness and procrastination, but a big part of it had to do with what was happening with the Tour.

First off there were the suspensions - less than a day before the race began, a large bust called Operation Puerto resulted in the removal of several pre-race favorites: Ivan Basso and Jan Ulrich were implicated in the investigation, and Alexander Vinokurov was a victim of circumstance since the bulk of his team was fingered. Unlike baseball, where the use of performance enhancing drugs and techniques are largely ignored or minimized (at least until recently), in cycling it’s a big deal - suspension for the first offense, lifetime ban for the second. Even the implication that you are involved is enough to have you removed from a race, which is what happened in this case.

Once the race started however, things got even weirder. Unlike the days when Lance Armstrong and US Postal took charge of the Peloton from an early point, this year was marked by the yellow jersey being passed from rider to rider. Sprinters Tom Boonen and Thor Husvold spent time in yellow. Lance’s old lieutenant George Hincapie nipped a few seconds in Stage One to spend his first day in yellow, and Serhiy Honchar smashed the field in a time trial to become the first Ukrainian to wear yellow.

I’ll be honest though, for the first week I wasn’t sure of who to pull for to win in general classification, to be wearing the coveted maillot jaune, or yellow jersey on the cobblestones of Paris. I had gone into the race wanting to see Jan Ulrich, the perennial bridesmaid to Lance Armstrong, pull off a victory - but he was gone, a victim of Puerto. Basso was my second choice, but he was out as well, and I didn’t have strong feelings on the rest of the Peloton so I dropped back to the old patriotism and started looking at the Americans.

This is when Bicycling Magazine stepped in for me and helped make the choice - the last issue had an interview with US Cyclists David Zabriskie and Floyd Landis. I remembered Zabriskie from last year when he tore up the opening stage wore yellow for the first few days of the Tour, but then crashed out rather spectacularly in the team time trial. Other than that, there wasn’t much I knew of him. Landis was different - I knew of Floyd back when he was riding for US Postal, and had followed him when he came over to Team Phonak to ride for Tyler Hamilton. When Tyler was suspended for alleged doping (I say alleged, because I personally believe that Tyler is clean) Floyd was thrust into the role of team leader.

None of this prepared me for the interview - I was expecting the typical pat answers to softball questions. You know, similar to what Crash Davis tells Meat to say when he gets called up to the show in Bull Durham. However, it was anything but that - these guys were cracking me up with their back and forth banter and their stories. They were just normal guys - well, normal guys who could pedal their asses all the way around France.

That sealed the deal for me. Floyd was my guy from about stage 4 - I wanted to see the Americans do well, and there were some other cyclists that I wanted to see win stages, but I wanted Landis in yellow on July 23rd in Paris.

Of course, right after that the Tour hit it’s first rest day during which Landis announced that he has been dealing with Avuncular Necrosis in his right hip stemming from an old injury and that he’ll have hip replacement following the Tour.

Hip replacement? Now, I’m not a doctor nor a particularly good cyclist (truth be told, I really suck) but I know that isn’t good.

Back on the road though, Floyd didn’t ride like a man needing a replacement hip - despite a last minute ruling by the referees that forced him to change his handlebar angle and a mechanical failure necessitating a bike change on the time trial he was within sight of the yellow in the second week, finally sealing the deal in the Pyrenees.

So Floyd was in yellow, but would he keep it? I’d watched enough of these races to know that only one yellow jersey really matters - the one they put on your on the Champs-Elysses. Sometimes it makes sense to “give” the yellow jersey away, since the team of the yellow jersey is under pressure to pace the peloton and control the race.

And give it away was what Team Phonak and Floyd Landis did - Oscar Peirro, Floyd’s one-time teammate on Phonak went on a long breakaway that pulled back almost 30 minutes of time on Landis to claim the yellow. The commentators were all fairly soundly of the mind that this was a mistake.

Once in the Alps however, Landis looked like a genius. On Stage 15, which finished on the fabled L’Alpe Huez, he rode away from Pierro and the other major contenders right back into the yellow jersey at the stage finish. I was fairly optimistic - Floyd was in yellow, but he would have to defend his jersey in the Alps for two more days.

Stage 16 can be best described as crushing, and as worst described as completely demoralizing. Floyd looked shaky for the first few climbs, and then completely cracked on the final climb of the day. Contender after contender when riding by Landis who was obviously in distress trying to force his way up the last 15 or so kilometers of the climb. Teammate Axel Merckx, son of cycling legend Eddie Merckx, paced Landis up to the line to finish - but he had lost nearly 10 minutes to Pierro and was out of yellow. According to all the commentators and the various cycling websites he was out of the contention for the yellow jersey as well.

Floyd himself said

“I don’t expect to win this Tour anymore. It’s never easy to get back eight minutes but I’ll keep fighting till the end and try.”

This was the point - when everything had gone wrong - that it would have been very easy for Floyd to pack it up and just accept defeat. Realistically, his chance were all but shot - however there was that streak of defiance, and that will to overcome in his voice in the interview that resonated with me. As odd as it may sound, at that point in time I had a glimmer of hope - if Floyd could pull back 6-7 minutes of time I felt he could probably make up the rest in the upcoming time trial. A small hope, but one nonetheless. The way I look at it, a true champion doesn’t lose heart, doesn’t lose the fight even in the face of incredible adversity.

It wasn’t long after I started watching Stage 17 that Landis made his move - there was a 11 man breakaway down the road at the time, and the Peloton was just lazing along. Then right at the base of the first climb Floyd popped off the Peloton…and they let him go.

And he went. And went. He came up to the breakway, looked around, and then plowed right through and blew that apart. A few riders managed to hang with him, then it was down to one T-Mobile rider - and even after sitting on Floyd’s wheel for an hour he was dropped on the last climb of the day!

All the while the gap to the Peloton, and the contenders went up and up and up. 3 minutes. 5 minutes. 8 minutes. I think it bounced out to 10 minutes at one point in time. It was an amazing ride - for the last climb of the route all I could do was sit on the couch thinking “come on Floyd, come on Floyd…”

Amazingly enough, he did it. Floyd finished the stage on his own for the win, but more importantly he was only 30 seconds out of yellow. Friend David Zabriskie’s recounts his thoughts on the day…

I saw Floyd this morning and gave him a big hug at the start. He said he was okay and he said he was going to attack today. He said that, one way or another, he was going to be remembered. And man, he is on a mission! I think he was just going for a stage win, but in the end he rode into the history books.

At one point he came up and told me, get ready! But it didn’t do me any good.

Why did the favorites let him go? I don’t know. I think maybe the just didn’t believe he could sustain the effort…or maybe they just couldn’t do anything against Floyd.

Take a look at the picture at the top of the post - speaks volumes, doesn’t it? That’s the look of defiance, of dedication, of perseverance. Unreal.

The rest of the race, although not quite anti-climactic, was at least somewhat predictable. Stage 18 was a flat stage out of the Alps and, as is usual, there was no change on the overall classification. Stage 19 was where it was all decided - starting third from last, Floyd Landis rode a hard and fast time trial to put almost 90 seconds into Pierro. Pierro - who at one point was almost 30 minutes out of the GC - rode the time trial of his life and claimed second, with German Andreas Kloden raising himself to the final podium spot.

Stage 20 - the ride to Paris - is the traditional final stage of the Tour (well, at least since 1975). As I explain to my friends “yes, it counts…but, by tradition, nobody attacks on the final day of the tour.” This was a lazy day up until the last hour (if riding 75 miles to Paris can be considered lazy), when the Peloton made it’s final 8 laps around the Champs Elysses.

Thor Hushvold of Norway won the stage, but in the end, it was the 8th time that the Star Spangled Banner was heard under the shadow of the Arc D’ Triumphe in June - only this time it wasn’t Lance Armstrong, but rather Floyd Landis.

Now the discussions swirl about Floyd’s future after his hip operation - “will he ride again”, “will he be as good”, “can he return”. I think that the people asking those questions haven’t fully absorbed what happened during these last 21 days in July - I think Floyd will be back - this year he set a new standard for grit, desire, and sheer guts. I don’t see him backing off that.