I received my official invitation to the Tour de France 2006 announcement ceremonies at the Palais des Congres de Paris. It will be on Thursday, October 27th. Unfortunately, they forgot to include a round-trip plane ticket, so I guess I’ll have to be one of those cycling celeb no-shows. Ha -Yeah - Sure... Everyone who receives media accreditation from the past year’s Tour is sent one of these invitations.

But, somebody else we all know sure won’t go... Lance will not attend. I usually would assume that Johan would be there, but given the recent events and comments, I’m not real sure that he will. Lance did say that for sure, he will be at the Tour next summer at times, remaining very involved with the team. Johan originally said that he couldn’t imagine both he and Lance in the same team car, but I think that’s gonna happen...

Wonder if Lance will want to drive one of the team cars in the race sometimes? It really is a skill and the drivers have to know exactly what they are doing, plus be really experienced. I think Lance is too smart to even think about doing that. For example, Jakob Piil was just taken out by an idiot service car driver at the Tour of Zurich. Jakob ended up with a broken hip, which is a major injury for anyone, but especially for a racer. You can say, oh well, at least it happened at the end of the season, but the amount of rehab and the suffering to get back in shape is huge....

The guys are riding Paris-Tours tomorrow, and my Iron Man Eki will be there, with the usual diehards: Chechu, Volodymyr, Stijn, Roger, Guennadi, Leif and Jurgen. A long, tough, 253 kilometer race, that ends in a straight 3km finish... Hello, sprinters....

Thanks to the blog commenters who suggested World Cycling Productions as the place to get the DVD of “Overcoming”. That’s where I ordered mine, but there is also a place on the CSC team site to order it. A little cheaper, but then you add on the handling and mailing fees and it kinda evens out. I can’t wait to get my copy and have a bunch of folks over to watch it....

I already have liked Bjarne from interacting with him at past US races, and I totally adore Ivan from hanging with him this year at the SF race. And of course, I know Z (Zabriskie) and Christian, so I’m a big CSC fan, too. But this movie really endeared them all to me. It’s no wonder they are all so loyal to Bjarne, he really cares about each of these guys on his team.

And it’s really great to have your comments again - I love hearing from you. It seems like the spammers have decided to target the blogspot blog sites. So I had to turn off the comments again while I fiddled with my firewall stuff, so I could get a Delete icon to toss the spam crap off... I wish Google would include the tool on our blogs that is something like Bravenet does, where the site owner can do IP banning.

And a heads-up for Saturday Night Live on October 29th - I hear that both Lance and Sheryl will be there....

The photo is from Stage 1 of the 2005 Tour...