Tour De France Is Here Again

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while will know that I have a particular fondness for the Tour de France. I believe it to be one of the world's greatest sporting events. The 2008 Tour de France has now started, so for the next three weeks I'll be blogging about it intermittently (maybe daily).

American riders have done very well in the modern Tour. Greg LeMond won it three times and Lance Armstrong smashed all records by winning it seven times. The year after Armstrong retired, Floyd Landis won the Tour. But a French lab accused him of doping and the title was taken from him.

Personally, I think he was innocent. The testing protocol of the French lab was very flawed, but everyone's afraid to call them on it. I think they were just tired of Americans winning the French race. Lance was too popular to accuse, but the unknown Landis was easy to sweep aside.

Last year the Discovery Team from the United States did very well. They won the team championship (the first time for an American team), and also had one of their riders win the overall championship. Unfortunately, the Discovery Team was disbanded last year.

But two new American teams have been created and both are in the Tour this year. It marks the first time the United States has had two teams in the race, and both seem to be pretty good -- but we'll just have to wait and see how well they do in their first Tour. The teams are Columbia (pictured above) and Garmin Chipotle.

So far, two legs have been run of this year's Tour, but they were fairly easy legs and there are a ton of riders still near the front. I'm going to wait until things start to shake out a little before I start posting any standings.