Wild card Barloworld surprises Tour with two wins

	Robert Hunter joins Juan Mauricio Soler as stage winners from Barloworld this week. Friedemann Vogel/Bongarts/Getty Images
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MONTPELLIER, France -- There is an unwritten rule at athletic contests in the States: no cheering in the press box. The same does not apply, apparently, to the occupants of L'Espace Presse -- basically a holding pen with two TV monitors just beyond the finish, where my ilk and I are herded in the waning moments of each stage.

Nine hundred meters from Thursday's finish, with the riders charging well in excess of 30 mph, a pileup took out a group of sprinters including Julian Dean, the Kiwi for Credit Agricole. With the line in sight and the endgame unfolding, a 30-year-old South African named Robbie Hunter played his usual card. He attacked early, bursting out of the final turn, nearly tearing the cranks off his bike as lunged for the line.

A beetle-browed, stern-looking man Hunter has contested six Tours de France. While he's come close a number of times -- he was nipped at the line most recently by Thor Hushovd in Stage 4 -- he'd never won a stage on cycling's biggest stage.

This time, to the delirious joy of fans from Capetown to Bloemfontain -- and one unabashed, boisterous and klaxon-voiced man in L'Espace Presse -- Hunter's early attack held up. After trading paint and the odd elbow with other riders in the run-up to the line, he held off the Swiss missile Fabian Cancellara for the first-ever Tour de France victory by a South African (or any African, for that matter) and the second stage win in two days for this team Barloworld.

The ruddy-faced, boisterous man in the holding pen -- his credential identified him as a "marketing" officer for the team -- had punctuated Hunter's effort with the following monologue:

"GO ROBERT! FIGHT FOR IT! GO! GO! GO! YES! YE-S-S-S-S! O MY GOODNESS. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? TWO! WE'VE GOT TWO!

Astonishingly, the Bad News Bars have now won their second stage of this Tour. That's incredible for a squad that only came together a month before the race, when Barloworld (identified on its Web site as "an industrial brand management company that achieves durability in business through long-term value creation" -- your guess is as good as mine), was offered (and paid through the nose for) a wild card entry to this year's Tour. Their bid was helped by the fact that Barloworld, while a South African company, is a British-registered team. This year's Tour began in London.

Not surprisingly, they didn't exactly have other teams trembling in fear in the early days of the race. As a new team, we got a bit of "Get out of our way attitude" from some other teams, Barloworld's Geraint Thomas told me outside the team bus after Hunter's win. "That's definitely changed."