Tour de Georgia weblog

Reminder: TdG on Cyclysm Sunday today at 4

OLN's coverage of the 2006 Tour de Georgia airs on a 2-hour edition of the network's Cyclysm Sundays show this afternoon at 4 Eastern.

If the coverage is as good as the race, it should be a barnburner.

Landis takes 2006 Tour de Georgia; Haedo gets his stage win

Haedo takes Stage 6,
photo by Frank Steele.

Floyd Landis took another big win on Sunday, finishing safely in the pack to win the 2006 Tour de Georgia.

Juan José Haedo, the Toyota-United sprinter who had made two podiums without a win, edged double defending TdG Stage 6 winner Gord Fraser and Phonak's Aurelien Clerc for the stage win.

Discovery Channel dominated the race, taking the team classification, the king of the mountains (Jason McCartney), the best young rider (Janez Brajkovic), a yellow jersey (Yaroslav Popovych), two stage wins (Popovych in Rome, Danielson on Brasstown Bald), and the 2nd and 3rd rung of the podium.

But the day belonged to Floyd Landis, who dug deep to hang with Danielson and Popovych on Brasstown Bald, protecting his 4-second race lead. He also survived a minor scare on Sunday, when he flatted late during the finishing circuits in Alpharetta, but was able to rejoin the field quickly.

An early 15-man breakaway was slowly reeled in, a few riders at a time, until only HealthNet-Maxxis' Jeff Louder and TIAA-CREF's Will Frischkorn stood between the sprinters and a podium, and Haedo's Toyota-United team and Fast Freddie Rodriguez' Davitamon-Lotto squad did the lion's share of the chasing.

I've posted a Flickr photoset of Stage 6.

HealthNet rider Doug Ollerenshaw's interactive weblog

dougollerenshaw.com

Doug Ollerenshaw rides for HealthNet-Maxxis, and is keeping a weblog of his race experiences this week at the Tour de Georgia.

He's also using a GPS and web application from Motion Based to track each day's ride, including elevation gain, wind conditions, his average heart rate, average speed, and distance.

The entire route can be exported to Google Earth.

Here's the dashboard for Stage 5.

Here's a shot of Ollerenshaw overtaking Trent Lowe during the ITT on Thursday.

Danielson takes Brasstown Bald, but Landis holds race lead

Landis delivers,
photo by Frank Steele.

Unbelievable. I'll never doubt Floyd Landis again. Before the stage, I thought there was no way he would be able to last mano a mano with Discovery's Tom Danielson.

But that's just what Landis did on the biggest climb in the Tour de Georgia, the 3 mile+ ascent of Brasstown Bald. Discovery's Danielson and Yaroslav Popovych took turns attacking Landis, who marked Danielson and eventually let Popo go. Discovery, realizing that Popovych wasn't going to get enough time to take the race lead, eventually let Danielson attack Popovych to try to finish Landis directly. Landis wasn't cracking.

Landis has got to top the short list of American Tour de France contenders, as he looks likely to add the 2006 Tour de Georgia title to the Tour of California and Paris-Nice titles he's already won this season.

Check out my Stage 5 Flickr photoset.

Stage 4 quick review

Sorry for the light posting; I've been going to the race instead of blogging it. I'll catch up this weekend, with more pictures and links to race reports around the web.

Wanted to say, however, what an awesome ride Freddie Rodriguez did today. I expected he would be back in the grupetto, cooling his jets and dreaming of Sunday, the last traditional sprint day. Instead, he pulled a Zabel, recognizing that he might not be the absolute fastest man in this field, but that he could be the fastest man to survive to the line. Brilliant.

Somebody noticed, as I did, that Popo wasn't wearing the leader's jersey yesterday. I still don't know why, but there have been a lot of jersey problems this year, with several teams getting fined for wearing vests that don't match their uniform and Phonak's “best young rider” not showing up at the jersey ceremony in Rome.

Today, it looked like Jittery Joe's riders were wearing new shorts, kind of an electrified camouflage in the team colors.

My only guess for why Popovych wasn't in yellow would be that there weren't skinsuits produced in yellow, so he rode his standard team skinsuit.

Operation Gadget details the new VeloNews race ticker

Operation Gadget | How VeloNews Built their Cycling Race Ticker

Dave Aiello over at Operation Gadget talked to Jeff Henderson, of Inside Triathlon and One Million Revolutions (I wanted to type "A Million Little Pieces" -- sorry, Jeff) about the new, improved race ticker they've rolled out for the Tour de Georgia.

Byron over at Blog Business Summit also commented on the new ticker, which he considers a Web 2.0-style mashup of disparate content sources.

I only used the new ticker on Tuesday, its first day, but it's a much better experience than the old text-only ticker. It reminds me of the custom video and PointCast (kids, ask your parents) browsers the big media companies built back in the day, but using web tools to simplify the data interchange and to make sure whatever you come up with will work on a wide variety of platforms.

Big Stage 3 photo gallery posted

I've got about 80 pictures from yesterday's time trial up.

Please comment (at Flickr or here) if I've misidentified anyone; I had start order and rosters, and in a few cases, more than one rider from a given team came through close together and could have reversed their start order.

My favorite pictures (click through for other sizes):

The big boys:

Stage 3 quick review

I haven't seen the full standings, but I heard at the finish line that Landis was the fastest on the day, but that Danielson held him within 4 seconds, and Zabriskie was another 20 seconds behind Danielson.

Based on what we saw on the course, I was surprised; Z looked like he wasn't even going hard on our steep uphill section, and I figured Landis would key off Danielson's time splits and go all out to make sure he had some time in hand before the big mountains start tomorrow.

Smells like a repeat of last year; I respect Landis as a climber, but Danielson is a climbing specialist who's becoming an all-rounder, and I see him leading the contenders at the top on Saturday. Should be an interesting couple of days.

TdGblog live from Nick-A-Jack Road

I'm sitting near the top of the Nick-A-Jack Road climb, shortly before the riders turn to begin the “real” climb of Lookout Mountain. The first official rider hasn't come by yet, but Luciano Pagliarini and Prodir-Saunier Duval teammate Peter Mazur rode by a few minutes ago. Pagliarini should be rolling around noon from Chickamauga. Big crowds on this climb, possibly drawn by the Litespeed SAG stop about 300 yards below me.

Popovych steals Stage 2 at Tour de Georgia

VeloNews.com | Popovych steals Stage 2 at Tour de Georgia

Popovych alone with the win
Frank Steele/tdgblog.com

Yaroslav Popvych of Discovery Channel showed why he's considered a rising stage-race star. The 26-year-old Ukrainian launched a violent attack on the day's last climb of Rome's Clocktower Hill, gapped the field while the sprinters tried to figure out who was chasing, and stayed away for a 6-second victory.

In the field sprint behind Popovych, Juan José Haedo of Toyota-United outkicked Freddie Rodriguez of Davitamon-Lotto. Rodriguez took 2nd on Tuesday, and now has only one more shot, in Sunday's finale, to take a stage win, his stated goal for this year's Tour de Georgia.

Targetraining is a new Continental team, and the sponsors got their money's worth on Wednesday, as Argentina's Alejandro Acton led the stage by more than 10 minutes at one point, and rode solo for nearly 100 miles. Acton was finally swept up just shy of the day's only King of the Mountains “climb,” the first ascent of Clocktower Hill. For his trouble, he'll wear the “most aggressive rider” jersey through tomorrow's TT and Friday's first mountain stage. Kirk O'Bee of HealthNet-Maxxis took the prime to be the first person in this year's King of the Mountains jersey.

Rodriguez took the sprint jersey, and sits 2nd, just behind Popovych, in the overall. The sprinters are likely to fall away tomorrow, as the riders face a long and hilly individual time trial from Chickamauga, Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Lance Armstrong was reportedly in attendance, riding in the Discovery Channel team car. He took a sprint finish here in 2004.

Also:

cyclingnews.com | Lightning strikes again for Popovych and Discovery in Rome
cyclingnews.com | Tour de Georgia Stage 2 Photo Gallery
ThePaceline.com (free reg. req.) | Tour de Georgia Stage 2 report