Stages 7, 8 and 9 are bigtime mountain stages in the Tour, and these are typically the most exciting and decisive in any bike race (if you’re intrigued and want to start watching, now’s the time). Today’s stage ends on a mountaintop finish — an “HC” category climb which means it’s so impossible that it defies the normal numbering system for ranking climbing difficulty.
But the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme, deserves a huge round of applause for devising a Tour route in which the flat stages so far have been almost as exciting as the upcoming high mountains.
Meanwhile, my Versus Fantasy Cycling team sucks. I’m ranked 12,000 or something, which is really horrible even though I’ve got Cancellara, Farrar, Armstrong, Tony Martin and so on.
