Whoo-hoo! Quite a finish in Stage 4 just now. Bettini, Cooke and Mazzanti were sprinting for the finish - Cooke tried to pass on the left and Bettini just kept movin’ on over, clear to the barriers. Cooke was squeezed into the barriers and crashed. It was really cool to see it on OLN - they re-played it several times from different angles. It didn’t necessarily look deliberate on Bettini’s part, but it was a very irregular line to the sprint finish, for sure. But Bettini had to know that Cooke was coming around. After the judges reviewed the tapes, Bettini got sanctioned and Mazzanti was declared the stage winner. This one is gonna be one big controversy - Cooke is pissed to the max and wouldn’t even listen to Bettini’s apologies or explanations, or whatever he was trying to say to Cooke.

I notice that the Italian moto cameramen rarely ever show the Discovery team. Maybe il Falcon will change that in the mountains. The team is feeling very confident about Paolo, and really stoked about working for him....

And to respond to a few folks who wrote about the tree-cutting for the race car event: The newspaper article said that the City did not consider netting the tree instead of cutting it down because it “was not a suitable species for downtown”. Guess it somehow took them thirty years and an auto race to decide the tree was not suitable. Evidently Mother Nature thought it was just fine where it grew, since it survived and thrived in that location for over thirty years. Not suitable - this is one spin that nobody buys....

Thanks to those who wrote - but the tree is gone, and some local wood carver got the chopped up pieces for free and is going to turn it into giant bathtub-size bowls to sell for a thousand or so each...