There are a hundred ways to love the tour.  A hundred different ways to be captivated by the three-week cycling spectacular.

You can be charmed by the pretty scenery of castles and little hamlets, forests, rivers and towering mountains. You can be awed by the suffering of the riders and their inhuman tolerance for pain. You can shake your head at the chaos of spectators, support cars and competitors or you can be fully immersed in the incredible nuance of the tactical battle. And then, of course, there is plenty of crash-porn.

Those whose blood lust gurgles with every bingle must be loving the first three stages as so far the teams have been subjected to just about everything but roadside IEDs.  A hairpin in the final kilometres of Stage 1 saw carnage as riders tried to take it five-abreast at 60kph. The Stage 2 bang-ups – as the riders screamed down a rain-slicked hill – frustrated the boys on bikes so much they unionised, agreed to a non-aggression pact and coasted over the line as if it was the final stage’s symbolic cruise down the Champs-Élysées. Makes sense, it’s a French race and no one protests quite like the French. Man the barricades! Cancellara asserted his will by holding back the peloton despite a few recalcitrants opposed to the go-slow – was it a good thing? The jury’s out.

Stage 3 was peppered with no less than seven stretches of tyre-puncturing cobblestone that reduced more than a few riders to crash test dummies. Cadel – who may have thought he was back on a mountain bike – is sitting pretty in third, the Schlek brothers have been split up with Frank breaking his collarbone, Contador looks ominous, Lance has a power of work to do and we are no where near the mountains yet.

Just when you thought the World Cup coming to its conclusion in Jo’berg would allow you full nights of slumber, the three weeks of the tour are here. At least the stages are finished by 2am…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure to subscribe to my rss feed or follow us on Twitter at Sportsnethols. Thank blogingbloging.com sharing this themes.