Road

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Spanish rider Pedro Horrillo (Rabobank) is in a medically-induced coma in a Bergamo hospital Saturday following a horrific crash in which he fell nearly 150 feet into a ravine during the eighth stage of the Giro d’Italia. The 34-year-old crashed about 70km into the 209km stage on the high-speed descent off the Cat. 1 Culmine di San Petro. It’s unclear what caused the crash, but teammates spotted Horrillo’s bike on the road. Evidently, he struck a guardrail and toppled into the deep ravine.

Garmin-Slipstream team officials say it's too soon to say how Christian Vande Velde's crash at the Giro on Monday will affect his training and the rest of his race season. Meanwhile, Vande Velde says the pain has gone from "excruciating" to "manageable." Team doctor Prentice Steffen said Vande Velde broke one rib and received a severe bruise and sprain on his back, as well as a hairline fracture to his pelvic bone.

Check out CyclingTips's author page.

For a rider who’s made a name for himself on the track, Bradley Wiggins (Garmin-Slipstream) has been surprising just about everyone when the road turns uphill in the Giro d’Italia. In the opening two climbing stages in the Dolomites, Wiggins has climbed better than ever before, finishing ahead of the likes of Damiano Cunego (Lampre) and Lance Armstrong (Astana).

Columbia-Highroad’s juggernaut at the 2009 Giro d’Italia continued Saturday as Kanstantsin Sivtsov used a bold solo breakaway late in the 208km stage to deliver a stunning solo victory 21 seconds clear of the hungry pack. Columbia almost made it a podium sweep, with Friday’s winner Edvald Boasson Hagen taking his second runner-up spot in three days while Michael Rogers was pipped by race leader Danilo Di Luca (LPR) for third.

The days have been long but fruitful. We have ridden more kilometers in the last week than most cyclists ride in a month, yet the hours in the saddle still seem to be passing quickly. The stages raced are slowly becoming a blur as our travel is incessant and every movement begins to blend together. What highlights the stages and separates them in my memory are our triumphs. It seems that all we have been doing the last week is eating, riding, sitting in the bus and sleeping. And, somehow, it seems we are eating and riding more than we are sitting or sleeping.

Check out CyclingTips's author page.

Columbia-Highroad's Linda Villumsen won Friday's prologue at the Tour de l’Aude Féminin, the most prestigious stage race in the world of professional women’s cycling. Villumsen, the Danish national time trial champ, won the 3.9 km prologue through the French town of Gruissan in 4:52.22. American Kristin Armstrong (Cervelo) and Amber Neben (Nürnberger Versicherung) were fourth and sixth, both three seconds behind Villumsen and separated by a fraction of a second. Sandwiched between was Columbia's Ina Teutenberg in fifth.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but there is a lot more to riding bikes than just training for the next race. And while I know that might sound obvious, for me anyway, that simple truth got lost for a little while. During the last year, I’ve been willingly immersed in an exciting new world of power meters, intervals, thresholds and watts. I trained indoors on powder days, bailed on friendly group rides so I could stick to my workout plan, and skipped a few Friday night bacchanals so I’d be fresh for Saturday’s ’cross race.

A look at the diet used by some Garmin team pros

Garmin-Slipstream’s American rider Lucas Euser was badly injured in a collision with a car during a training ride outside the team’s Spanish base of Girona on Thursday afternoon. Euser, 25, suffered a broken right knee, two broken ribs on his left side and a number of cuts and bruises.

The motorcycles, helicopters and stationary cameras of RAI Television bring you the Giro d’Italia up close — the video taken from right next to the riders and from the air and the long shots from the finish line.

Columbia-Highroad knew its young steed Edvald Boasson Hagen would probably win a stage in his Giro d’Italia debut, they just didn’t expect it so soon. Sport director Ralf Aldag thought Boasson Hagen, who turns 22 on Sunday, would be a factor in breakaways in the second half of the Giro. But just a day after sprinting to second, the tall Norwegian outfoxed a veteran group of five riders to hand Columbia-Highroad another stage victory.

Lawyers for top German cyclist Andreas Klöden on Friday spoke out to reject claims that the former Tour de France runner-up was involved in doping with his former team, T-Mobile. Experts who spent two years investigating the procedures of two Freiburg University Clinic doctors who worked for T-Mobile (formerly Deutsche Telekom) alleged Wednesday that Kloeden doped during the 2006 Tour de France.

Despite the turmoil surrounding the Astana team finances, manager Johan Bruyneel assured VeloNews on Friday that the squad will be at the Tour de France in July. Astana rode with new jerseys Friday that virtually fade the team sponsors from view, a gesture that the team is hoping will trigger a reaction from the Kazakh sponsors.

As the 92nd Giro d’Italia heads into its second week, Lance Armstrong will find himself racing on terrain he knows very well, even though this is the first time he has raced the Italian grand tour. The Texan is still in training mode at the Giro, but knowing many of the road he’ll be racing on through Wednesday should help him in his quest to bid for a stage win later in the race — perhaps as early as next Thursday’s 60.6km time trial along the Cinque Terre coast. The connections with Armstrong are intense and frequent over the next five stages of the Giro.

The sun hasn’t set on Astana yet, but the glow of the team’s sponsors has certainly dimmed. Following a long-running row over the non-payment of the team’s wages, eight of nine riders on the Kazakhstan-sponsored squad started the Giro d’Italia’s seventh stage Friday wearing race jerseys and shorts Friday with the names of the team’s major sponsors virtually faded out. Astana manager Johan Bruyneel said the protest is the team’s way of demonstrating its frustration that Kazakh sponsors are not fulfilling its contract obligations to the team.

Check out CyclingTips's author page.

Check out CyclingTips's author page.

Mechanics need the right tools to do their jobs. While of course their trucks are stocked with myriad good bike tools, sometimes they choose to use tools they made themselves. Or they appropriate a tool that was made for a different purpose. And the truck itself is a tool that is critical to doing their job.

Homemade truing stand

Lance Armstrong will target a stage win in the Giro d'Italia after falling off the pace in the overall standings, race leader Danilo Di Luca claimed on Thursday. "You mustn't forget that he stopped competing for three years and fractured his collarbone a month and a half before the race," the Italian said after completing the sixth stage. "I saw the footage of the Alpe di Siusi stage (on Wednesday) on television and he gave everything," Di Luca added. "He's doing his best, he's honoring the Giro. I think he'll focus on a stage victory."

Michele Scarponi (Diquigiovanni) soloed home an impressive victory Thursday to leave the chasing peloton in his rear-view mirror in the 2009 Giro d’Italia’s first successful breakaway.   Despite a frenetic chase by Quick Step and Katusha, the sprightly Italian held out after 198km in a five-man move in the 248km sixth stage over two rated climbs to the posh Austrian ski town of Mayrhofen. He won by 32 seconds clear of an impressive Edvald Boasson Hagen (Columbia-Highroad).  

Belgian cycling federation president Laurent De Backer has hit out at the president of world cycling, Pat McQuaid, following the International Cycling Union's (UCI) decision to sanction Tom Boonen. Belgian star Boonen, who recently claimed a third victory in the prestigious Paris-Roubaix one-day classic, tested positive for cocaine in April — less than a year after he first tested positive for the drug, in May 2008.

Lance Armstrong just wants everyone to calm down. Some over-eager fans and media accustomed to watching Armstrong crush the climbs were dismayed Wednesday at the sight of him being dropped on the 24.9km summit finish to Alpe di Suisi, but on the day after, Armstrong was keen to put things in context.

Check out CyclingTips's author page.

Team Type 1 announced Wednesday that it has hired Michael Creed, the domestic all-rounder who was fired by Rock Racing last month. “It’s nice to be in a position to help out a deserving American rider like Mike Creed,” Team Type 1 Director Sportif Vassili Davidenko said. “He will definitely be an asset for us in some of the biggest races in the United States this year.”

To start, it might be worth pointing out that these entries are being written via BlackBerry, so I apologize for their sometimes-rambling nature.

Under a strict interpretation of UCI rules, teams are only allowed to ride with “a single design for clothing (colours and layout) which may not be altered for the duration of the calendar year.” However, teams have made changes in the past, with the prior approval of the UCI. The UCI approved, for example, the Discovery team’s switch to a green-themed team kit for the 2007 Tour de France, a change designed to highlight an initiative undertaken by its title sponsor.

Roasted Gingered Salmon with Mango Salsa and more

Team Astana will wear a new kit in either Thursday or Friday's stage of the Giro d'Italia to signal upcoming changes at the team, sources told VeloNews. The team's special kit will include the names of all of the current sponsors, but the design itself will be changed. "There is no sponsor change, just changes to how the jersey looks to represent the significant changes that are ahead for the team," said a source who is in close contact with the team.

Investigators reviewing the records of two Freiburg University Clinic doctors who worked for cycling team T-Mobile allege German rider Andreas Klöden doped during the 2006 Tour de France. Kloeden, who finished second in the Tour three years ago and is currently under contract with the Astana team, is quoted in the 63-page report published by a three-man commission after a two-year investigation. Most of the allegations were outlined in a lengthy story, published in the German magazine Der Spiegel late last month.

Wednesday’s short but explosive climbing stage across the heart of the Dolomiti lived up to its dramatic backdrop at the Giro d’Italia.   The serpentine 24.9km climb up the snow-choked Alpi di Suisi summit at the end of the 125km fifth stage played executioner for some big names and culled the list of would-be winners down to a baker’s dozen.  

Race vehicles are critical for team success at a grand tour. Astana, for example, has in its stable 15 cars, two fully-rigged race-service trucks, one big bus, one medium bus, one small bus, one camionette, and one camper. Not all of them are used in a single race, but the garage the team uses is huge, in order to accommodate the entire fleet.

Cinelli’s XCr frame is an interesting experiment that mashes together classic steel bicycle frame craftsmanship with new world technology. From the classy side, the XCr features its choice of steel for a material, exquisite Italian welding and craftsmanship, not to mention, a classy design — including the seatstay-integrated seat post clamp. These features are juxtaposed by the incorporation of, arguably, the industry’s most advanced steel alloy, a progressive BB30 bottom bracket design and an integrated headset.

While the Tour de France is formulaic in its structure, the Giro is a mishmash of stages. Four days into the race and there have been three different leaders, challenging finishes and varied terrain. The Tour doesn’t reach the mountains until the end of the first week whereas here, in Italy, we rode into the sharp white-faced Dolomites today. And from here on, the race will not relent.

VeloNews Photo Director Don Karle, in Italy for the Giro d'Italia, decided Tuesday to go on a ride to get a feel for "what the riders were up against and what it was like for the spectators on a mountain-top finish." So Karle hooked up with top Italian racer Amy Rasic for some guidance, and the pair ended up doing what Karle called "a sweet ride, probably the coolest in my life so far."

Check out CyclingTips's author page.