Hello Faithful Farrar Fans (FFF)

Remember the classic movie My Fair Lady? In that movie Audrey Hepburn has some trouble with her pronunciation, so she is taught a catchy little ditty…

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

This may be a good song, but it is lousy weather forecasting. Today the Tour de France did head to Spain, but not to the plains in the middle where Madrid is located, but rather along the NE coast, where Barcelona is located. Turns out THAT is where the rain was located today.

Rain is great if you have a thirsty plant, but it is pretty bad news when you are on a bike going really fast. Remember that these guys have tires that are about the width of a paperclip and are pumped up to something close to 5 billion PSI (OK I exaggerate, but you get the idea). Suffice it to say there is a not a lot of tire surface touching the road. When the tires of these guys hit a particularly wet or slippery patch, the race turns into a bowling alley, with riders falling, slipping, and sliding all over the Spanish countryside.

The bad news is that there was a rider or two who had to drop out of the race after some bad wipeouts today.

The good news is that our man Tyler appears to be OK after a scary little incident.

Incident, you say? What incident? For you linguists out there, you will recall that NE Spain is the home of the Catalan language. Sort a cross between French and Spanish, with some completely made-up words thrown in for good measure. Here is an example of some Catalan language I heard today on the TV from a little girl who witnessed the incident…

Mamà si us plau, puc jugar amb Teeter totter que agradable home de Wenatchee que realment és un velocista més ràpid que el noi de l’illa de Man-terra?

Thanks to Google Translator, here is the English version…

Mommy can I please play teeter totter with than nice man from Wenatchee who really is a faster sprinter than the guy from Manx-land?

What the little girl had spied was the fact that Tyler was just behind a group of riders (including at least one Team Columbia HTC rider) who wiped out going around a roundabout in the rain. Tyler managed to avoid most of the carnage right on the road, but he did end up skidding upright right next to the guardrail. He hung on for a second, then actually partially tipped over the guardrail, suspended for a few moments like his bike was a teeter totter.

On the TV, it looked like he was able to shake it off and get back on his bike. He took it easy the rest of the day, and finished in a group 10 minutes behind the leaders. Late reports said he had a sore rib, but was OK to continue with the Tour. Whew. Taking it easy was probably a good call — better to live to ride another day.

In other race news from the day, one of Tyler’s teammates, David Millar from the UK, nearly pulled off a breakaway victory, but was caught heading up the final hill. Because the finish was on a hill, it was a bit different that in the other recent sprints. For example, the tail-less wonder from Manx Mark Cavendish was not at the front, finishing something like 16th. The Thor God of Thunder guy from Norway I mentioned a couple of days ago won the race.

I will say Thor did look strong sprinting up the final hill, so he deserved to win. Still, you have to wonder just how tedious it would be to have him around all the time. Imagine if you were his wife and he came home every day bellowing “Thor, God of Thunder, has returned!”. I would expect the response would pretty quickly devolve to, “Thor, please shut up and make yourself useful by doing battle with Maytag, God of Washing Clothes”.

So all in all, Tyler has had an incredible first week on the Tour. The guys now head into the mountains for a bit, so I don’t expect too much from Tyler for a while. I will give an update in a couple of days, and will resume the daily coverage when the stages get back to those where our hero Tyler can spread his own version of Wenatchee sunshine to the land of good wine and weird little hats.

- Bruce

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