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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2949066" data-attributes="member: 26473">It's been a racing season of mixed feelings.A huge doping scandal hit cycling this year, and literally the day before the Tour the top five riders in the race were pulled out of the competition - one of the five is not under investigation himself, but because so many of his teammates are, his team was dropped because they couldn't start the required number of riders.Either these guys are guilty, in which case this is a good thing for the sport, or they're not, in which case a huge injustice has been done.All that aside, the racing has been quite good so far.  Floyd Landis, former USPS domestique for Lance Armstrong and now team leader for the Swiss team Phonak, currently holds the yellow jersey, which must be giving the poor French fits - "Another American leading Le Tour!?! Zut alors!" Some of the sprint stage finishes have been exciting, and the first two mountain stages showed who the five or six contenders are for yellow in Paris. Team Discovery Channel, which took over sponsorship after the USPS dropped the team in 2004, has had a rough tour so far, with only one day in yellow and no real GC contender for the overall win - however, they did earn a stage win today, so that's made up for some of the disappointment this year. And there's still another week-and-a-half to go, with the Alps looming next week. Monday is L'Alpe d'Huez, one of the all-time classic mountaintop finishes in cycling - good stuff! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Now it's time for an espresso and a baguette - au revoir!</blockquote>

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