Tour de France recap

I'm going to take a break from the postings about the tragic events, and my usual badgering about buying my books to talk about sports.

Recent followers of this blog are probably unsure of what I'm talking about, but long time followers probably know I'm a huge cycling fan, and there's nothing bigger in cycling than the Tour de France, which ended on Sunday.

This year was a good race, but not for the normal reasons.  This year the every day stages were very exciting, and the competition for some of the "lesser" jerseys was also quite exciting, but the competition for the overall yellow jersey was actually pretty boring.  I've been following cycling for almost 30 years, and I'd have to say that Bradley Wiggins was quite possibly the most boring winner I've ever seen.  Don't get me wrong, he deserved to win, and he and his team rode a great race, but there were none of the attacks of Hinault, LeMond, or Armstrong.  He just let his team do everything for him, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it, which made the race for the yellow jersey kind of boring.  Even with his teammate challenging him from second place, we didn't get any of the drama that we saw from the LeMond, Hinault battles.  So, yeah, a boring, but well deserved victory for Wiggins.

It was nice to see Peter Sagan take the race by storm, and as Coloradoan, it was great to see Tejay Vangarderan win the white jersey as best young rider.  At 23, the guy showed a lot of class when he was asked what he'd be thinking about when they reached Paris, and instead of any of the pat answers most athletes would give, he responded by saying that he'd be thinking about the victims of the Colorado shooting.

So, another year is gone, and hopefully we know who really won the race.  I'm hoping that it was a clean race, but we might have to wait a year, or two, or ten...