The day the tour was won

It dawned as a rather grey but warm day with rain and storms a potential threat later in the day.  By consensus, we had as a group decided that we needed to see up close potential Australian cycling history in the making, so our riding was reduced to 30 km (which most of us refused to do under grey skies) direct from the TT start to the TT finish.  So once again more bus time, and for me no ride time.  The TT start was interesting, we had planned to be at the finish town where our hotel was so that we could watch the last two hours of the race on a big screen if need be.  Today was the last designated riding day of the tour, so we also had to find time to clean and box our bikes for the trip home.  What all of this meant is that we only spent a few hours at the start and were gone before most of the big guns even came out of the team busses.  Once again I decided to meet some of my tour friends as well as a few stage winners...

As usual there was lots of tricked out TT machines on display - bike techno heaven...

We spent some time at the CSC bus where Scott Sunderland was giving interviews in a mix of languages.  He said that today the tour was in the balance and could go either way - either a great result or a not so great result, but still good for the team - that was the beauty of the sport. 

 

After travelling back to the finishing town - where our hotel was located, it was time to decide where to watch the race from.  We needed to see a screen to be able to understand what was happening in the race - but I was keen to see the race up close - which was why we were in France in the first place.  I left a lot of my companions at the hotel in search of the gold standard - being on the line when the race was won - as well being able to see a screen.  I think I did pretty well .......

All in all I was pretty pleased with myself I got to say hello to my old tour mates at the finish line again.  The result was a bit of a bummer, given that most Aussies started the day with high hopes.  Team CSC were very happy ....

and I walked back to the Hotel - the only good news for the day being that the wallabies had beaten the All Blacks in the rugby.

We had our farewell dinner that night and I think it's fair to say that the "temple" was well and truly desecrated.  We started on red wine at dinner and finished off in the town square across from our hotel which was in party mode to celebrate  the tour coming to town.  My annual beer quota was consumed and many of us staggered back to the hotel in the early hours of the morning feeling quite sorry for ourselves.