Tour of CA #3 - Other Pictures and Pithy Captions

Bikes

In the... "Hey, I ain't riding that piece of shit!" category.

I had read where the Columbia guys were not starting out the season on Scott timetrail bikes. Here is proof..... This is Cav's Giant that he rode last year.... Just de-stickered and re-painted.

I am sure there is a reason behind this.... but Rock Racing is supposed to be on Kestrel Bikes, right? It would seem that Kestrel could make a pretty good TT bike. So .... what's the story behind Oscar Sevilla and a couple others riding a Fuji.

The Garmin boys were sure to never be lost......Running a high zoot GPS device on all their TT bikes

Riders

My wife took a whole bunch of pictures of Tom Boonen. It may be that her finger just go stuck on the button while the camera was in auto. Or, maybe not. I know that there are alot of girls out there who would give just about anything to be this close to him. My favorite Boonen story is the one I get to re-live when my brother tries to impress his wife by stating "That ain't nothing honey, I have seen Tom Boonen naked!" (it happened in the 07 Tour of Qatar when my bro timed his leave from his deployment in Iraq to go take in the race). But I digress. I chose this picture because.... well.... who knew that Tommeke had a butt like Beyonce's?

You may need to enlarge this pic up to full size to see why I asked the wife to take it. While you are doing that, I have a question for ya. Have you ever pulled up behind one of those pickup trucks that have the sir-name of the driver across the rear window? It usually says something like "Rodriguez" in very fancy letters in a nice arch. Well, imagine my amusement when I notice that Steve Cozza had this very thing in a sorta tramp-stamp tattoo on his lower back? I am guessing he did this so that if he is found passed out in the gutter naked, the cops know who he is?

Frank Schleck was all over the judges when they inspected his bike.

Maybe that had something to do with his number for this race.

Oscar Friere just oozed cool the whole time he was hanging out in the start house.

Svein Tuft was quite a bit bigger than I imagined. But then again, he had to be to do all of this before he took cycling seriously.

Jens.... there is no substitute

I believe that the UCI judge was saying something on the order of..."You call that a big crank? That's nothing! Look at the weapon that Jen Voigt packs!"

Channelling Chris Horner....."Look at your little bitch ass having to cover up your shoes. If you were rocking a pair of these new MAVIC kicks, you would never want to cover your shoes again! I wake up each morning and piss excellence. And my shoes show it!"

I just cracked up when I saw this picture an OUCH rider giving the 2008 Tour of France winner the "Who the F#$@ are you?" look.

Winning the award for the most complete transformation. I saw this guy covered in mud and loving life at the CX Nats just a short time ago. Now look at him!

Kits

I thought the Rock Racing kits could have used "Nevermind the Bullocks!" splashed somewhere... but they were still pretty cool if you took the time to study them.

What, no burrito this year?!?!? I live just down the street from Chipotle #1. This hurt me bad to see they burrito fired from the back pocket.

To care or not to care

You could tell by his attitude in the start house that Levi is very motivated to win the Tour of CA.

You could tell that DZ was pretty motivated to win the day.

You could tell that Ian McGregor was motivated to show someone he had a heart on.

And you could tell that the Liquigas team except for Ivan Basso didn't really care. They rode their road bikes (complete with SRMs and dual bottle cages) for the prologue.