{"id":31,"date":"2007-07-08T22:05:13","date_gmt":"2007-07-08T21:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/08\/how-did-he-do-that-tour-stage-1\/"},"modified":"2007-07-09T15:32:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-09T14:32:00","slug":"how-did-he-do-that-tour-stage-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/08\/how-did-he-do-that-tour-stage-1\/","title":{"rendered":"How did he DO that? Tour Stage 1 (updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Robbie McEwen was in a crash and injured his wrist about 20 km from the finish for Stage 1. With about 7 km left, he just reached the peloton &#8212; the massive group of cyclists jockeying for position. (Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tdfblog.com\/2007\/07\/stage-1-rapid-r.html\">tdfblog&#8217;s story<\/a> for fact-checking.)<\/p>\n<p>McEwen is a consummate sprinter, so the race is only worthwhile if he&#8217;s in <b>front<\/b> of the peloton. In about four minutes, he and his team (Predictor-Lotto) had to get him through the almost one-hundred other riders in the Tour. Every one of those riders knew that, if McEwen were allowed to get through, he might beat the others&#8217; teammates.<\/p>\n<p>So I was astonished to see Robbie McEwen just burn past all his competitors in the last 200m of today&#8217;s race. Eurosport TV had an overhead view that made it look like all the other sprinters were dragging anchors. If you have about three minutes, take a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/ie.youtube.com\/watch?v=0p8n6dfJoYc\">the video on YouTube<\/a>. The backstory is first, and the overhead view is toward the end of the clip.<\/p>\n<p>In last year&#8217;s Tour, he won three stages with superhuman sprints like this one. But the commentators (and I) believed that he&#8217;d be exhausted from making his way back into &#8212; and then through &#8212; the peloton.<\/p>\n<p>Guess not. That&#8217;s why I love following the Tour &#8212; every day brings you a new group of heroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robbie McEwen was in a crash and injured his wrist about 20 km from the finish for Stage 1. With about 7 km left, he just reached the peloton &#8212; the massive group of cyclists jockeying for position. (Thanks to tdfblog&#8217;s story for fact-checking.) McEwen is a consummate sprinter, so the race is only worthwhile [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}