Vino, Kloeden nurse injuries before heading into Alps

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Friday's flat 200-km Stage 6 through wine country came down to another riotous mass sprint taken, surprisingly, by Tom Boonen, a Belgian of Quickstep-Innergetic who much prefers to be escorted toward the finish with a more orderly lead-out than he was provided. But Boonen ham-and-egged it, Robbie McEwen-style, for his 10th win of the season, his first of this Tour. Say goodbye to the sprinters for a while. On Saturday the boys must get over a serrated colossus called the Col de la Colombiere. Boonen, Thor Hushovd and their ilk will be more concerned with making the time cut than winning the stage.

The promenade from Semur-en-Auxois to Bourg-en-Bresse -- a "transitional" stage, in that it delivered the peloton from the flats to the Alps -- gave battered riders a chance to begin healing Thursday's wounds. While I focused on the tumble taken by race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov, he was but one of several racers to be taken "to hospital," as they say in Europe, after the stage. Vino's Astana teammate, Andreas Kloeden, ended up sprawled in a culvert, tenderly kneading his tailbone, which turned out to be fractured. The Versus crowd made a big deal of that, but I think they were being a little melodramatic. I mean, what's the big deal, finishing a 2,200-mile bike race with a broken coccyx?

Seriously, watching Vino and Kloeden limp through Friday's stage at the back of the pack, I wasn't sure for whom to feel sorrier: the German with the broken bone, or the Kazakh with stitches in both knees and one elbow. So taped up was Vino that he looked like the principal villain in that Scooby Doo classic, Where's My Mummy?

"So, he's just nails," remarked my wife, Laura, who was walking past the TV as the camera lingered on Vinokourov. Laura doesn't get a lot about cycling -- she's never been able to get her head around the whole "ceremonial" last stage into Paris, for instance -- but she got that right.

They're all nails. Certainly Benjamin Noval is. The Discovery domestique lost more blood than Vino yesterday, plunging through the rear windshield of a team car that had irresponsibly slowed in the road. He returned to the team hospital at 11 p.m. "with stitches in his biceps and chin, and a big hematoma on his hip," director Johan Bruyneel told Versus' Craig Hummer. "I hope he can survive today. If he gets thru first hour and a half, I think he can make it."

He made it.

It isn't just their ability to saddle up with stitches and road rash and fractures in inconvenient places that makes these riders different from you and me.