I start out today with an apology - two actually. First of all, we published an article yesterday comparing the ONCE and Postal teams. The article was not kindly to George Hincapie (because, perhaps unfortunately, the author, Podofdonny, would want him to be training for the Autumn Classics rather than riding in France).

However, George has been extremely gracious to the Daily Peloton these past months, providing multiple terrific interviews for which we are very grateful, and therefore Podofdonny wishes to publicly apologize to him by posting here a note that will be also sent via email.
 

Dear George,

Please do not take this assessment too seriously - it was meant to be a fun sort of article which I mainly wrote to introduce our largely US readership to the depth of the ONCE squad and to encourage debate on the merits of the two teams...

I have always considered you to be one of the best classic riders of your generation and have a pet hate of the true Classic men in the tours - hence your low mark - Museeuw would have got a similar mark had he been riding for the Domo squad.

Thank you so much for reading the article - and thank you for your contributions to our little site in the past, and, er, hopefully in the future.

Wishing you and the team best of luck for the rest of the Tour - and if you are still reading next year my Postal versus Domo team for the Paris Roubaix, I can assure you that Mr Hincapie will be a 9.5!

Thanks again and sorry if I caused any offence.

Best regards, and see you in Paris.
podofdonny
 

Well, we've seen some terrific stage results so far - a terrific triple Dutch win yesterday with Karsten Kroon so very thrilled (story here), wins by Zabel in Stage 6, Bradley McGee in Stage 7, Botero winning the ITT today (whose win was also correctly predicted in our Tour Notes), and Galdeano in the maillot jaune yet another day. By the way, on the Tour Main Page you can now find a link to the official Tour results.

Tomorrow is a rest day, and after Wednesday the riders hit the Pyrenees (originally known as The Circle of Death) hard and fast  - though I am not sure the winner predictions for Stage 11 will hold true.  As Lance Armstrong warned, the Tour would not be boring, and "the mountains will be decisive." We agree!

A testament to the interesting little towns detailed in some of our Stage previews are the Forges les Eaux stage notes by Peter Cossins at the end of last week - the start village press area was the local livestock market!

We will continue to bring you live reports by our great "tickerers" Jaime Nichols, Anita van Crey, Podofdonny and Locutus. We also have results of each day's stage (often included in the live reports), followed by notes on the Tour and the daily Jambon Awards (here's today's).

Fabio's Fantasy Game and the Directeur Sportif game are rolling right along. I hope you are playing one or both, and doing better than me...

Russia's Svetlana Boubnenkova won the Ladies Giro that concluded this weekend, while Adam Homolka won the Austrian Uniqa Classic. We also info on the Fastest Man on Wheels, diaries from Mtn biker Kashi Leuchs at the Cross Country World Cup and Suze Woods about the Cascade Classic in Oregon. 7Up's Chuck Coyle tell us his Firecracker 50 mountain bike story here - What? Chuck on a mtn bike?

Our host will be performing scheduled maintenance this Wednesday, 17 July, between 09:30 and 14:00 British Standard Time (which is pretty much the middle of the night if you are in the US). Hope there is no inconvenience to any of you.

Site tip: If you are looking for an article by a particular author or from a certain day, the best place to check is the News Archives. It lists each article by title, date and author.
 

That's it for now. Please email me with any comments or suggestions. Have a great week and a great Tour!