Tour de France: After 1998's Tour de Farce, welcome to the Tour de Sang. Most appositely for the city where the Marseillaise was composed, with its references to spilling impure blood, since the Tour caravan arrived here last week corpuscles have topped the agenda.
Until yesterday it was a matter of whose blood, in which fridge and being kept for what purpose?
The finish sprints that dominate the opening week, on the other hand, are pure blood and thunder. Yesterday was another reminder of that. Immediately after crossing the line, yellow jersey wearer Thor Hushovd lay prone, doctors desperately trying to staunch the claret spurting from his right shoulder after a freak accident in the finish straight where the stocky Frenchman Jimmy Casper took victory.
Hushovd looked as if he had been knifed in a bar-room brawl, but he had actually fallen foul of one of the green, 18-inch high cardboard hands that are given out in their hundreds of thousands by the betting company that sponsors the green jersey awarded to the best sprinter. Hushovd, ironically enough, had won the award last year.
The hands are prized by the fans, who cannot resist waving them over the crowd barriers in a way that delights the marketing men, because the logos and the colour get television exposure. This annoys the sprinters who have complained that the practice is highly dangerous because they ride so close to the barriers.
The point was made again yesterday after one of the hands sliced open Hushovd's upper arm like a scalpel as he made his move 150 metres out. Then he crossed the line with blood spraying his bike and his fellow sprinters' faces.
Hushovd was taken to hospital and is expected to start this morning. Tour officials last night said the hands will no longer be permitted in the final kilometre.
"It's very dangerous, it's not the first time it has happened," said Casper, who had never won a stage in the Tour.
The Marseillaise was being sung loudly and liquidly in the streets here on Saturday night, and there were signs encouraging Les Bleus on the roadsides yesterday. Casper's win will bring another surge of Gallic pride.
French stage wins are rare and nationally cherished items nowadays as the French media and teams consider their riders are racing in a "two-speed sport" where French teams are "clean" and those who win rather dubious. If yesterday was cyclisme a deux vitesses, Casper had a third.
Hushovd will start this morning without the maillot jaune he won in Saturday's prologue time trial. He finished only ninth in the sprint and was relieved of the race lead by Lance Armstrong's closest friend in the peloton, George Hincapie, who had finished less than a second behind Hushovd on Saturday.
Hincapie, the only of Armstrong's team-mates to complete all his seven victorious Tours, saw an opening at the final intermediate sprint, where he sneaked into third place, carrying a time bonus which meant two seconds were deducted from his overall time. That made him yellow jersey "on the road".
Armstrong will no doubt be delighted, as he part owns Hincapie's Discovery Channel team, but he will not have smiled when his old adversary, the president of the World Anti-Doping Association Dick Pound, said he felt last week's drug scandal had left the image of cycling and the centrepiece of its calendar "in the toilet".
Speaking on Radio Five Live, he repeated the view he expressed in the Guardian last October, saying cycling had been "close to being in clinical denial".
"If they resolve to do something about it then they have a chance to take some steps they haven't been able to do in the past. Something has to be done about it, or the risk is the sport will be ignored by some, marginalised by others, and it won't be a sport any more."
Guardian Service
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