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Columbia-Highroad’s Ina-Yoko Teutenberg on Monday took her second win in this year's Tour de l'Aude — her 17th career win in the French stage race. American Amber Neben (Nurnberger Versicherung) maintained her overall lead in the 10-day race, which has one more day of relatively flat racing before hitting the mountains on Wednesday. Teutenberg avoided a last-kilometer crash to come away with the stage 3 win.

Columbia-Highroad’s Ina-Yoko Teutenberg on Monday took her second win in this year's Tour de l'Aude — her 17th career win in the French stage race. American Amber Neben (Nurnberger Versicherung) maintained her overall lead in the 10-day race, which has one more day of relatively flat racing before hitting the mountains on Wednesday. Teutenberg avoided a last-kilometer crash to come away with the stage 3 win.

In one of his latest Twitter entries, Lance Armstrong said that the “real” Giro begins after Monday’s rest day. And his Astana teammate Chris Horner confirmed in his blog for The Oregonian, “the real battle to become the winner of the … Giro will begin to build” with Tuesday’s epic stage 10 through the Italian Alps.

Steve Peat can now stake his claim to be the best World Cup downhiller of all time. One month before his 35th birthday, the British downhiller squeaked by countryman Gee Atherton (Animal-Commençal) to win the fourth round of the 2009 UCI Downhill World Cup in Vallnord, Andorra. In doing so Peat took his 17th career World Cup victory, surpassing Frenchman Nicolas Vouilloz as the winningest man in the series’ 16-year history.

Norway's Thor Hushovd (Cervélo TestTeam) won the first stage of Spain's Tour of Catalonia, a 3.6 kilometer time trial in Lloret de Mar on Monday. Alejandro Valverde (Caisse d'Epargne) was second while New Zealand's Greg Henderson (Columbia-Highroad) was third. The second stage on Tuesday will consist of a 163.1-kilometer ride between Girona and Roses. The Tour of Catalonia, the third oldest cycling stage race in the world after the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia, will finish on May 24 in Montmelo.

American Amber Neben, riding for the German team Nürnberger Versicherung, took the lead of the Tour de l’Aude Féminin on Sunday after her team won the 27km team time trial. Neben, the reigning world time trial champion, won the 10-day stage race overall title in 2005 and 2006. In 2005 Neben won the title by just one second ahead of Trixi Worrack. This time, Worrack is Neben's teammate and now sits in second, 8 seconds behind.

One team that’s been uncharacteristically quiet so far through this Giro d’Italia is Saxo Bank. The former CSC squad is usually at the sharp end of the Giro peloton, riding to victory with Ivan Basso in 2006 and second with Andy Schleck in 2007. This year, however, the team came without a strong GC candidate and is taking a different approach to the season’s first grand tour.

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Mark Cavendish kept the Columbia-Highroad party rolling on Sunday, delivering the team’s third consecutive victory in the controversial stage in Milan. Cavendish out-kicked Allan Davis (Quick Step) and Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Slipstream) to win for the first time in the 2009 Giro. Here’s what Cavendish had to say after the victory: How important was it for you to win today?

What was supposed to be celebration of cycling in the heart of Milan turned into a bitter farce Sunday after riders angrily neutralized the 165km ninth stage for what they labeled a dangerous circuit. Mark Cavendish gave Columbia-Highroad its third consecutive victory, but the protesting peloton only raced the final 10km as all sides started pointing fingers at one another. A day after Spanish rider Pedro Horrillo plummeted nearly 150 feet into a ravine and spent the night in a medically induced coma, a week’s worth of nervous racing reached the boiling point for the rattled peloton.

Times taken from the ninth stage of the Tour of Italy will not count towards the race's general classification following a protest from the peloton on Sunday, officials said. The 165km ninth stage is being held on a 11km circuit inner city circuit, but after riding at the relatively slow speed of 33kph (20.5 mph), the bunch stopped six laps from the finish to protest at unsatisfactory security measures.

Spanish cyclist Pedro Horrillo was brought out of an artificially-induced coma on Sunday the day after he sustained serious injuries in a crash Saturday during the Tour of Italy, race organizers said. The 34-year-old Rabobank rider crashed on the descent of the Culmine di San Pietro pass about 70km into the 209km eight stage and was airlifted to hospital in Bergamo. Horrillo sustained fractures to his thigh bone, knee and neck and had difficulty in breathing properly. A hospital scan however showed that there had been no brain damage.

After being in Italy for a week and a half and with eight days of racing completed here at the Giro, I've noticed a thing or two. In fact, based on this list I've compiled, I've noticed at least ten things.

Columbia-Highroad's Ina-Yoko Teutenberg won for the 13th time this season on Saturday, taking stage 1 and the overall lead at the Tour de L’Aude. Teutenberg took over the lead from her teammate Linda Villumsen, who won Friday's prologue of the 10-day race. Teutenberg now holds the record for stage victories in the Tour de L’Aude — 16, with the first taken in 1997.

The chart shows the daily Training Stress Score (TSS), maximum 5-minute and 20-minute power output for stages 3-6. Stage 6 had the highest TSS value at 409, along with the highest 5-minute power output at 480w, and also the highest 20-minute power output of the Giro so far at 397w.

The graph shows the final climb up the Alpe di Siusi which took Goss 78 minutes to climb 25km at an average grade of 5.8 percent. He averaged 326w with an average heart rate of 166.

Just over a week ago Team Saxo Bank’s Matthew Goss was anxiously awaiting the start of his first ever grand tour. Goss, of Australia, has decided to share much of his grand tour debut through his own words as recorded within his training journal, along with his power and heart rate data collected from his SRM power meter. Stay tuned for more updates as told by Matthew as he endures one of the world’s hardest sporting events.

Opportunistic

Chris Horner is lighting up the 2009 Giro d’Italia. Just weeks after breaking his collarbone in a horrific crash at the Vuelta al País Vasco in April, Horner is powering through the Giro. “The form’s been really good. I had fantastic legs at País Vasco,” Horner told VeloNews after Saturday’s stage. “The crash there with the broken collarbone, I thought it might knock me out of the Giro. I kept training on the home trainer all the time. I came in here with good legs.”