Tour Notebook

Cycling Weekly magazine rounds up the stories surrounding this year's Tour de France.

AUSSIE COWBOY: Stage seven winner Bradley McGee was rewarded with the extra prize of a small cow by the local council at Saint-Martin-de-Landelles, the start village for the following stage eight, and home to Tour speaker Daniel Mangeas. McGee’s victory became a closer-run affair than he would have liked.

After meticulously planning the run-in with his team, three kilometers from the finish he discovered he had forgotten to get the fdjeux.com mechanics to change his 54-tooth chainring, used for leading out fellow Aussie Baden Cooke in the sprints. “So I used the 11 at the back and it seemed to work” he said afterwards.

FAST SPEAKER: If you have ever wondered how the sprinting domestiques in a team like Telekom manage to negotiate all the different obstacles in the final kilometers, the answer is they send a member of the team staff to inspect the finish of each flat stage. The staff member then rings the team directeur sportif, Rudy Pevenage, and warns him exactly what is coming up.

“Rudy guides the riders through over the earpieces, yelling ‘Roundabout -- go right!' or ‘Traffic island -- left!’” Telekom sources told CW. “The only problem is he has to say it all in German and then in French for Kevin [Livingston], [Giuseppe] Guerini and [Bobby] Julich, so he has to speak really fast!”

HANDS OFF!: PMU has been ordered to remove all of its giant green hands from the Tour de France finishes following Robbie McEwen’s protests that they were endangering him and other sprinters. McEwen suffered cuts on his arm as he roared to victory in Reims, from the impact of the hands. However, the hands are still allowed further away from the line, and seemed to have made a return to the finish area on stage six.

CSC POWER STRUGGLE: Laurent Jalabert and Bjarne Riis had made up their differences following the CSC-Tiscali team time trial debacle. “I wanted to know why we had changed our tactics, after it had been agreed that we would only stop for me, Tyler [Hamilton] or [Carlos] Sastre. But then Bjarne thought it was a good idea to wait for Sandstod. It was a bad strategy.”

“I’m the one who gives the orders round here,” Riis had replied aggressively, but Jalabert reassured reporters that, “We’ve cleared up the whole question. I’ve forgotten it.” On Saturday, Spanish newspapers were full of suggestions that Jalabert’s problems with CSC could open the door for Oscar Freire in the Danish team. The double world champion, however, did not comment on this before he quit the race with back problems following his stage seven crash.

DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE: Bernard Sainz, aka "Doctor Mabuse", who has been involved in several doping affairs, including Frank Vandenbroucke’s latest brush with the law, has been spotted in a team hotel during the Tour’s first week. Sainz was seen at the Novotel at Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray on the evening of stage five, where the U.S. Postal Service, fdjeux.com and Jean Delatour teams were spending the night.

DON’T MESS WITH EDWIN: Lance Armstrong has changed bodyguards for the 2002 Tour. Thierry the Thai kick-boxing champion has been "let go", as the Americans say, and the Texan has opted for a lower profile form of protection. Armstrong’s good friend George W. Bush put the U.S. Postal leader in touch with a man known only as Edwin, a bodyguard the U.S. President used while he was governor of Texas. Armstrong recently claimed he and other team members had received death threats during the early part of the 2001 Tour.

A NOSE FOR A GOOD STORY: A local trade fair center in Alençon, which is also used as a cattle market, was emptied of its usual four-legged inhabitants and converted into a press center on stage six of the Tour. Reports were filed and photographs transmitted that evening, accompanied by the overpowering smell of manure.

TEETHING TROUBLES: ONCE-Eroski rider Jose Azevedo took the unofficial prize for the most unusual injury of the first week. The Portuguese rider, fifth in the 2001 Giro d’Italia, had to have two front tooth nerves cauterised by a dentist after a stone struck him in the mouth on stage five.

GUESTS OF HONOR: The widow and family of a policeman who died in the September 11 attacks in the USA were flown into France as guests of honor by the French gendarmerie and the U.S. Postal Service team on the day of the team time trial. The family stayed with the team at the American squad’s hotel.

NO LOCAL HERO: The French region of Normandy has hosted two entire stages plus a stage start and stage finish in this year’s Tour but, unusually, this year there is no local rider in the race. At the start in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, fans saved their noisiest cheers for Frenchmen Jacky Durand and Frédéric Guesdon, the 1997 Paris-Roubaix winner, and they made up for the absence of a coureur regionale by waving posters in memory of the late five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil, who hailed from the region.

ANQUETIL TRIBUTE: Five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault drove ahead of the race on the stage into Rouen to lay a wreath and pay his respects at the tomb of Jacques Anquetil in Quincampoix.

SENT HOME: Ag2r-Prevoyance have sent home a mechanic suspected of being linked with a doping affair in amateur cycling currently being investigated by French police. “We had no idea he could be involved,” team sources commented.

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