So I used to follow @digger_forum on twitter a while ago, he's kind of an extremist anti-anybody-even-tangentially-associated-with-doping which was fun when Armstrong had his fall and the Skybots were supposedly clean. When someone has a big attack in the mountains you know a bunch of tweeps will analyze the power to weight ratios and compare it to the dirty days of Lance and Basso and Ulrich. I stopped following after he was saying the reduced suspension deal that Zabriskie and those guys took for testifying against Armstrong, Bruyneel etc was too lenient.
Anyway I looked at his feed to see what he was saying about this year's close finish, with like 5 guys close to Froome on yellow,no signs of suspicious power output... and he was whining about the alpine stages being boring with not enough attacking. LOL... what do you want, a clean race with short attacks and a tight leaderboard or big unbelievable attacks? Pick one.
Anyway, I was hoping for Bardet to threaten somehow on the TT but he needed to have the yellow before today plus a minute or two, he was never going to beat Froome starting from behind. But a dramatic TT to hang on to third by a second. (And nice setup in Marseille with the starting and finishing line inside a stadium).
Very happy to see my team, Slipstream-Chipotle-Garmin-Transitions-Sharp-Cannondale-Drapac surprise everyone and put Rigo Uran on the podium in 2nd place. Smallest budget in the World Tour. Pretty amazing. And they signed a new sponsor to at least secure a couple more years, but it sounds like they're still hunting for a title sponsor to increase the budget to to the level of the other teams, if not Sky.