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The rain. The pain of a team time trial. And men and women simply doing their jobs at the Tour.

An analysis of the time splits at Thursday’s team time trial show that the U.S. Postal Service squad was on target to place second before Christian Vande Velde skidded on the slick, white-painted center line and fell, bringing down the team’s No. 2 rider Roberto Heras. The crash happened just inside 15km to go. If the other seven Postal riders hadn’t have waited, not only would Heras have lost a couple of minutes but he would also have felt abandoned. And that’s not how a team wants to go into the mountains, where the Spanish climber needs to be at his best to help Lance Armstrong win the

Even a brief visit to one of the women’s grand tours in Europe will leave even the most casual observer asking questions about equal treatment. The hotels are cheaper, the press coverage infrequent and the transfers often border on the ridiculous, sometimes up to 200km. But at least one front, this year’s edition of the Giro d’Italia femminile – the “Girodonne” – has achieved a degree of equity: the Italian drug police raided the hotels on Wednesday night. In a move reminiscent of this year’s men’s Giro d’Italia, the Italian anti-drug police, swooped in and searched the rooms and processions

The USCF Masters National Road Championships got underway July 7 in Spokane, Washington. Nearly 600 men and more than 100 women are expected to compete during the six-day event, which includes age-group road races, criteriums and timer trials. For all the latest results click here.

Look time trial bikes, which took a black eye a few years ago with some weak forks, pulled off the ultimate Tour victory – an entire team winning a stage on them. This, the day after Laurent Jalabert notched a win with a Look road bike, and two days after Stuart O’Grady took over the yellow jersey riding yet another. There are more Look bikes in this Tour than any other make, as four teams (Credit Agricole, Kelme, Big MAT and CSC) are riding them. That puts Look ahead of Pinarello, which has three teams (Telekom, iBanesto and Fassa Bortolo), and Colnago, which has two (Rabobank and Mapei).

Whew, today was tough. After yesterday's fiasco, I was really hurting. It was not very sportsmanlike what ONCE and U.S. Postal did yesterday. ONCE attacked as a full team at the feed zone on a windy day. Feed zones are already dangerous enough, and it's just an unwritten not to attack in them. Sometimes it might happen that a single guy might try to get away in one. But not for an entire world class team to do it. It's like attacking when the yellow jersey gets a flat. It caught our team and other teams by surprise, and the fact that Postal and Telekom followed suit, well, we weren't happy

Remembering Verdun's 600,000 war dead along the La Voie Sacrée (the Sacred Way)

SHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE Crédit Agricole now has the top three spots on GC

But for a single mishap, the Posties had a near perfect ride.

The ONCE team did a stellar job keeping Beloki in the race for GC

Moreau is still in the mix on the strength of a great TTT

Credit Agricole's goal was to only lose a minute on the day. Surprise.

O'Grady hangs on to the jersey one more day

Cofidis

Ready for the pre-race warm-up

Bobke doing a stand-up for OLN's U.S. broadcast

Sentinals marked each kilometer along the Voie Sacree today -- the supply route in WWI to the Verdun front

Ah, a steaming cup to start the day

The monocoque Pinarellos of iBanesto, Fassa Bortolo and Telekom always look cool -- though Ullrich may have wanted a motor

Thor Hushovd's Look KG396 CLM matched the rest of the team's.

Axel Merckx and the rest of his team rode Daddy's time trial frames to a 14th-place finish.

Laurent Jalabert and the CSC team downed packs of High5 gel on the start line and stuffed more up sleeves and shorts legs for la

Kelme's cool hinged Catlike helmets let air in at the head where the hinge opens. But not all Kelme riders get the cool frames.

Look KG 396 CLM fork detail on a CSC team bike.

Maybe spiked hair tests out better in a wind tunnel than an aero' helmet?

Zipp wheels and GT frames brought American technology to Lotto.

US Postal got concerned about the wind and exchanged its HED3 front wheels for Mavic Cosmics.

Freddy's new ride

There aren't too many flat roads on Wednesday's 215km stage 4 from Huy to Verdun that traverses the Ardennes range from north to south. And the stage won't be made any easier by a predicted three-quarter head wind gusting up to 25 mph and possible rain showers. The good news is that most of the day's climbing is in the first half of the stage, when the unfavorable wind should keep the peloton together.Despite that likelihood, there are bound to be early attacks. Half the field is now more than five minutes off the pace, and 40 of them are more than 10 minutes behind race leader Stuart

5:30 p.m. local timeSo a few of you have asked that we not reveal the winner in the headline or first paragraph, so if you don't want be surprised as you work your way through our now-not-so-live updates click HERE to work up from the bottom and follow the race from the start. For the rest of you today's winner was ... 5:12 p.m. (local time) Jalabert earns his fourth Tour de France stage win, but he will not make it into the yellow jersey. Stuart O'Grady managed to finish close enough to keep the overall lead. Dierckxsens earned second and Nazon edged out Fast Freddie Rodriguez for

Stage Winner: Laurent Jalabert (F) CSC-Tiscali, 215km in 5:17:49----------------------------------Overall Lead: Stuart O'Grady (Aus) Credit AgricoleSprinter: Erik Zabel (G) Deutsche TelekomClimber: Patrice Halgand (F) Jean DelatourUnder 25: Florent Brard (F) Festina Click below for full results.

On Wednesday, the Tour de France made its way back into France, after racing through Belgium for three days in the opening week of the race. Along the route from Huy, Belgium, to Verdun, France, was the war memorial in Douaumont, commemorating the two-and-a-half-year battle in World War I, where more than 150,000 French and German soldiers lost their lives. But looking back on Stage 4 of the Tour, it’s the 150km of roads before that monument that will be remembered most after an epic chase and a surprising show of force by the teams of the top contenders for this year’s overall title. On

Defending Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong of the U.S. Postal team remained tight-lipped as he arrived in Verdun, France after the fourth stage of the Tour de France, a 215km haul from Huy in Belgium on Wednesday. However the 29-year-old Texan, who has refused requests for interviews ever since he told an Italian newspaper of his links to Italian doping guru Michele Ferrari, had a few words for French television. Armstrong, who came in with a 75-man bunch seven seconds behind stage winner Laurent Jalabert of France, told TV reporters that this was the first time he'd been tested on

The pursuit of the Yellow is the hot topic of the month, but today's stage rolled past reminders of bigger matters and sadder times. On the approach to Verdun, there were numerous memorials and thousands of crosses in honor of the hundreds of thousands soldiers who died in this region of northern France in World War 1. The first photo on this page is of a memorial along today's route, and contains the remains of 150,000 unknown soldiers killed in the Battle of Verdun in WWI.

First Steve Peat went down with a shoulder injury. Now Chris Kovarik is out with … visa problems. Word out of the Intense camp is that the American INS boys up in Vancouver wouldn’t let the young Aussie downhiller back into the States after he’d finished up competing at the World Cup race at Grouse Mountain because he had the wrong kind of visa. "He’s got a five-year visitation visa, but what he needs is a work visa or an athlete’s visa," said Intense owner Jeff Steber, Kovarik’s primary sponsor. "We’ve got all the right paper work going now, but at minimum it’s going to take two

The television coverage of today's 210km stage from Huy to Verdun probably didn't do justice to the level of racing going on. It doesn't get much more difficult than a day like we had. Any way you slice it, working at the front all day at full speed is a hard day at the office. An attack went at the 15 kilometer mark that included Vinokourov from Telekom so we made a point of chasing it down. If we let him get some time on the field he would have become one more rider we'd be forced to keep track of. And we don't want to have to worry about him when the roads start slanting up. When the

After 215km, this was a pleasant sight

Vande Velde: 'If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it right.”

Heras, Armstrong and Beloki: That kind of firepower made everyone suffer.

Ossuaire Memorial for the unknown soldiers

Nardello after a spill

O'Grady

The Tour barbers are part of the traveling village that moves each day

Heras (with his soigneur)

Postie bikes ready to roll

5:16 p.m.(local time) Here is the unofficial top 20 list from stage 3 of the 2001 Tour de France. Stuart O'Grady is now officially the overall race leader with a 17-second advantage over Festina's Christophe Moreau, the man who first wore the jersey in Dunkirk. 1. ZABEL Erik GER TEL 198.5km in 4:5:7; 2. MAGNIEN Emmanuel FRA, FDJ; 3. GARZELLI Stefano ITA, MAP; 4. BALDATO Fabio ITA, FAS; 5. SIMON François FRA, BJR; 6. MIKHAILOV Guennadi RUS, LOT; 7. CAPELLE Christophe FRA, BIG; 8. BOUYER Franck FRA, BJR; 9. BAGUET Serge BEL, LOT; 10. ARMSTRONG Lance USA, USP; 11. MOREAU Christophe FRA, FES;

Everyone knows that a potential Tour de France winner has to make climbing strength his No. 1 priority. An inability to ride fast uphill is a serious handicap. And there's plenty of climbing ahead in this Tour -- starting with Tuesday in the Ardennes of southern Belgium. This is the hilly region where the infamous Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Cup classic takes place every April. It's a race that showcases strong climbers. Five-time Tour de France winners Eddy Merckx of Belgium, and Jacques Anqutil and Bernard Hinault of France, all won the Liège classic. Among the event's most famous climbs

Steve Peat’s dream season has been put on the shelf for awhile. According to Peat’s GT team manager Dean Golich, the British downhill star will miss 3-4 weeks after suffering a third-degree shoulder separation in a training-run crash at the World Cup stop in Grouse Mountain outside Vancouver, British Columbia last Thursday. That means Peat will definitely miss the next World Cup race, stop No. 4 July 14-15 in Durango, Colorado, and is questionable for race No. 5 at Arai, Japan, July 28-29. Prior to the injury, Peat had been having the best season of career. He’d won five straight races --

After two days of chasing time-bonus sprints to try to get his hands on the leader's yellow jersey at the Tour de France, Australia's Stuart O'Grady did it the old-fashioned way on Tuesday -- by finishing in the lead group of stage 3. Meanwhile the race leader at the start of the day, Rabobank's Marc Wauters, fell far behind on the difficult climbs in the Ardennes region of Belgium. At the finish line in Seraing, Telekom's Erik Zabel took his second stage win of the week, thanks to the smooth teamwork of his Telekom team, while O'Grady finished in the pack, but took the race lead by 17

Stage Winner: Erik Zabel (G) Deutsche Telekom in 4:34:32----------------------------------Overall Lead: Stuart O'Grady (Aus) Credit AgricoleSprinter: Erik Zabel (G) Deutsche TelekomClimber: Benoit Salmon (F)AG2RUnder 25: Florent Brard (F) Festina Click below for full results

Rather than have a VN editor in the States tell you what you're about to see, today you'll get the details straight from Casey B. Gibson's email: "Photos include the family of Marc Wauters as the race passed through his home town, the day he wears the Yellow Jersey. Very cool, and he rode right into their arms. Must have been every TV camera and photog in Belgium there as well, and there were so many in the street it almost stopped the peloton. "The shot of Lance and Freddie is as they swerve to avoid the mayhem. "The finish was very hard, and must have blown quite a few. George looked

If I think about it, the racing thus far has been about as I would have expected, but I forget how hard the first week of the Tour is. You remember all of the mountain stages, but this first week comes as a shock every time. And it’s not over yet. The Giro was hard the first week, too, and, like here, there were lots of crashes. But there were always times on each stage where the riders would all relax, and you knew nobody was going to attack. It just had a natural rhythm to it, and you would get 30-50K that was easy. In the Tour, though, there is never an easy pace where guys are just

Our crack reporting staff is working hard to bring you these updates

Peat during happier times.

O'Grady: 31st in the stage, but a great jersey to pull on

Zabel does it again

Today's route through the Ardennes region of Belgium brought back memories of the Spring classics

Nicolas Jalabert and Frédéric Guesdon made the field suffer with their breakaway

The Wauters family: Waiting for the favorite son to stop by

The Armstrong (r) and Rodriguez (l) navigate the Wauters traffic jam

Antwerp fans

Road rations

Julich

Hincapie's having fun at the start

But the end isn't so pleasant

Warm sunshine, a favorable breeze and a completely flat stage Monday are all the ingredients needed for a stage of record speed. And for Tour stages longer than 200km that means the 48.764 kph average of 1998’s stage of 205.5km from Tarascon to Le Cap d’Agde won by Tom Steels. The absolute Tour stage record speed is the 50.355 kph set by Mario Cipollini on the 194.5km stage from Laval to Blois in 1999. Cipollini is, unfortunately, not at this year’s Tour, but Steels is. Ordinarily, Mapei-Quick Step’s big Belgian would be the favorite to win Monday in his own country, but on Sunday he showed

5:10.m. (local time)Wauters is the man in yellow. A Belgian takes the day when the Tour finishes in Antwerp. Stay tuned for complete results of today's stage, a post-race wrap up story from VeloNews Senior Writer Bryan Jew and analysis and a preview of tomorrow's race from VeloNews's John Wilcockson. 4:53p.m. (local time)Wauters! He takes the stage (and that $22,000 diamond) as the leaders have indeed managed to stay away from the frantically chasing field. And the Belgian from the Rabobank squad is now also the new overall leader of the Tour de France. 4:49p.m. (local time)

Stage Winner: Marc Wauters (B) 4:35:47----------------------------------Overall Lead: Marc Wauters (B) Sprinter: Jan Kirispuu (Est)Climber: Jacky Durand (F)Under 25: Robert Hunter (RSA) Click below for full results

The Tour de France yellow jersey is one of those prizes that is known and coveted in the sports world for its history and prestige. Like the NHL captain who hoists the Stanley Cup, or the golfer who slides into the green jacket at the Masters, the rider who dons the maillot jaune at the end of the Tour de France has worldwide recognition. Everybody knows that the Postal Service’s Lance Armstrong has pulled that jersey on in Paris each of the past two years, and is one of the favorites to do so again. But in the early stages of the Tour, it’s a whole different breed of rider who chases after

The TV cameras may focus on the front of the race, but we all know that action isn't always up there. French and Belgian scenes today by Casey B. Gibson.

Foreign riders won both the men's and women's races of the second leg of the four-race BMC Software Grand Prix in Arlington, Massachusetts, Sunday. In the end, it was Mercury-Viatel’s Australian Baden Cooke taking the 62-mile men’s race and Canadian Lyne Bessette of Saturn winning the 42-mile women’s race. The women's race kicked off the day, although many of the riders thoughts were anywhere but on the race as they struggled to face the memories of this event last year when Saturn rider Nicole Reinhart was killed in a crash. "Our goal is just to celebrate Nicole's life and get through the

You hear people complaining about having one of those "days". Well, I think I might be having one of those "seasons". There's nothing more frustrating than working hard, sacrificing and staying dedicated only to find yourself at trapped under a pile of cyclists. And while there's no time within the moment to ask yourself how the hell you got there, the question does linger for a while afterward. Especially while you're standing around waiting for a wheel. The nagging gets especially annoying while you're on the rivet trying to catch the caravan. You can forget about catching the peloton

He's golden. Wauters earned the yellow jersey when the Tour came to Belgium

Jalabert

Vaughters

This way...no this way

The sponsor village