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Tour de Freedom

What better way to celebrate the independence of this great country of ours than to watch a crowd of Europeans in tight shorts ride bicycles around the French countryside?

Umm, well, yesterday, while every other red-bloded American and their uncle braved the threat of e. coli^* at picnics around the country, I spent part of the Fourth of July holiday watching the thrilling finish of Stage 3 of the 2005 Tour de France. Now, I've been in a couple of cycling races, so I have some clue, but the foremost thought in my mind as I watched the peloton burst into the city of Tours was how the heck can they avoid smacking into each other?

The answer, of course, is sometimes they can't. Other times, it's not so accidental.

The other thing that seems strange to me is that these guys are so evenly matched that over the course of hundreds of miles of cycling, the leaders are separated by mere seconds. Indeed, were it not for his inexplicable crash with one mile left to go in today's team time trial, American Dave Zabriskie would have finished within one second of Armstrong.