I post all types of different bicycles and human powered machines here on the blog, but anyone who has been reading for a while knows that I really love road racing bikes. I have some commuter/ urban bike content to post soon, but right now I am focused on following the Tour de France just like a lot of other cycling fans. As someone who has followed the Tour every year since the mid eighties, I have been disappointed by the various doping scandals over the years (staring with the Festina debacle in ‘98). This year though, I am really excited about a Tour that is wide open. Maybe I am just naive, but I really do believe that the sport is cleaning up. Furthermore, I believe that many other sports have much bigger doping problems than cycling; they just don’t appear to be dirty because the doping tests are so lax (if at all). Yep, the sport I love has been getting a bad rap lately, but I think that is starting to change. It is a great sign that three new title sponsors (Garmin, Columbia, and Saxo Bank) made announcements to get involved with pro cycling right before this year’s Tour.

Buy hey, this site is about bikes and design, so I won’t go into too much more commentary about the Tour and pro cycling in general. There are better sources on the web to read racing news and Tour coverage. In addition to following the Tour at all the usual locations, I will be checking out the featured links of each stage that can be found at velo.kwc.org (which I discovered this morning by way of Cyclelicious). I’ll also be reading the Masiguy commentary on each stage. Tim is a fellow bike geek and I think he always provides an interesting perspective on the race.

Of course, you all know that I am interested in the bikes as much as the race itself, so the first sites I usually check each day during the month of July are the Tech sections at Cyclingnews and Velonews. Yesterday, Velonews showed us stage 1 winner Alejandro Valverde’s crazy looking Pinarello Prince. Today, over at Cyclingnews, you can see the (understated by comparison) bike that won stage 2, Thor Hushovd’s Crédit Agricole Look 595. I know that not everyone has warmed up to the aesthetics of the new Dura Ace group yet, but I have to say that really like the way it looks on that bike. If I could have my pick of stage winning bikes, I would certainly pick Hushovd’s 595 over Valverde’s Ronald McDonald colored Pinarello or the Time that Samuel Dumoulin won on today. But I might as well stop daydreaming. No one is going to give me a stage winning bike, so I should probably get back to work to make up for following live race coverage on Cyclingnews all morning.