Tour de Crash, 6th stage (plus three random links):

Today's stage of the TdF was won by Mark Cavendish, who found his second victory of this year Tour in the same place where he got his first win at the Grande Boucle. Cav was amazingly helped by his whole team (P. Velits, Martin, Goss, Renshaw, Goss, Van Garderen, Bak and Eisel) and managed to outsprint Petacchi and his old nemesis Greipel, who had tried to anticipate the sprint.

The Italian sprinter was particularly down after the stage: in an interview with Italian tv, not only did he sound sadder than usual (if you can imagine that...), but from his voice it sounded as if he was going to burst into tears. 'Ale, what is happening to you?', a RAI journalist asked him. Petacchi didn't answer immediately, but then he said: 'I don't know'. A few seconds later, the journalist ended the interview by saying: 'Sorry, but this is a very hard moment for Alessandro'. We couldn't see the images of what was happening, but I suspect that Ale actually started to cry. And all because of that stupid rule approved by the Italian Cycling Federation. Absurd.

Back to the sprint, it must be said that Chateauroux is a friendly pace for sprinters. In 1998 it was Cipollini who won a stage there, whereas in 2008 the French town witnessed the rise of Mark Cavendish. On both occasions, Erik Zabel was one of the toughest adversaries for the two eventual winners (he was 2nd in 1998 and 3rd in 2008).

Unfortunately, this stage gave us strong emotions not only during the sprint, but also in the last 35 kms of race. ''How nice! Why do you say 'unfortunately', then?'', I hear some of you ask. Well, the problem is that those emotions were produced by different crashes which involved many different riders.

A few kms after the beginning of the race, the first sad moment arrived when Boonen decided to give in and abandon the Tour. Too much sufference for the Belgian, who was really down when he had to leave the race. Hopefully, he'll be back in his top shape soon.

Then, with 35 kms to go, a very big crash (caused by the riders' lack of attention) put an end to Bradley Wiggins' dreams of glory. The English champion looked great at the start of the race, since I had never seen him so skinny (this year he weighted 2 kgs less than in 2009) and motivated. Unfortunately, for him the Grande Boucle ended on the way to Chateauroux.

Also Remi Pauriol was involved in the same crash as Wiggo and had to abandon the race. Horner, on the other hand, managed to keep on riding, although he crossed the finish-line with 12 minutes of delay. Levi Leipheimer instead had a mechanical after being involved in the crash and lost about 3 minutes in the GC. The same happened to Kreuziger.
As you can see, it was another bloody day at the office for some of the Tour riders.

Hoping to cheer you up a bit (this evening I'm in hurry), here I share with you some useful links.

http://blog.tv2.dk/chris.anker.ol/entry405528.html : as my most faithful readers already know, in July Chris Anker Sorensen writes on his blog more often than usual. Therefore, me links his blog to mine much more often than usual. In his last two posts Chris revealed us that he's rooming with Richie Porte, who teaches him a lot of Australian slang and snores a bit. Nicki Sorensen, on the other hand, is sharing a room with Brian Vandborg.

http://sansenmag.livejournal.com/: if you want to have some fun during the Tour, I suggest you taking a daily look at miss Sansen's blog. On it you can even find an exclusive list of 'who is rooming with whom' during the Tour :)

http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-sports/nicolas-roche-robbie-williams-was-in-my-room-giving-it-socks-2812834.html : thanks to miss Sansen, miss Fede has recently come across the blog of Nicolas Roche. The guy is not only good-looking - he's also very good at blogging. And yes, he can ride bikes too. In this post, Nicolas tells us about a misadventure that he had after watching 'Finding Nemo' the other evening.

Enjoy!