Tour de France - Stage 4. I’m starting to think that we're gonna to need a daily Tour Carnage Report. Jeeze - the crashes and weird stuff keeps on happening. I knew that Sandy Caspar had crashed yesterday, and it turns out that it was caused by a drunken spectator, who then almost got into a fight with the DS. While that was going on, spectators tired to steal Sandy’s wheels! OMG... Can you believe it?

Stuart O’Grady is riding with a cracked vertebrae from yesterday’s crash. In a pre-race interview with Frankie Andreu, Stuey said he is in a lot of pain - “like a knife stuck in my back”. For a tough guy like him to even say that, it must be hurting like Hell. Imagine all the bouncing around on the road going right through his spine.

Chris Horner is riding with a dislocated little finger - it’s splinted up around his hand. He said they were shooting the gutter, with smooth pavement, and that the village must have run out of money, ‘cause it suddenly turned into dirt and they took a header, going 50 mph.

So Johan Bruyneel was still making crafty moves with the Time Bonus Sprints, and Egoi Martinez took every one of them for something like 18 seconds, which moved him into 5th in the GC. He was in the break-away group that stayed out till about 7km from the finish. Egoi was pulling 800 watts of power and redlining on his heart rate monitor. The two guys, Martinez and Lefevre, were caught by the frantically chasing, loosely organized sprinters lead-out men at 2Km.

There was another crash on the turn leading to the finish, mostly Euskaltel-Euskadi guys, Iban Mayo went down and some stopped to help him. Julian Dean fell over sideways at the finishing sprint - he just started leaning and over he went like the 2,000-year-old man on the old, old Saturday Night show.

It was kinda amusing to see José Luis Arrieta drafting the team vehicles to get back to the peloton after a flat. He ended up drafting the red Official’s car on camera. Usually, unless a rider stays a long time behind a car, the officials look the other way. However they could hardly overlook this, but they did....

The TV screen kept showing the SRAM heart rate for several riders - my Iron Man, Eki, rode along with the lowest damn hear rate you could imagine. That guy is a wonder, riding his 15th Tour. I hope he rides the Tour next year to even out the record of 16 Tours held by Joop Zoetermelk.