Bordeaux Time Trial

Today was our chance, finally, to visit the "starting village" for a stage of the Tour de France. This was the final individual time trial starting from Bordeaux, a large city about 30 minutes west of our hotel in Saint-Emilion. It's kind of hard to describe, but the village consists of a sort of movable town square with sponsors' tents arranged around the perimeter, and various booths serving different kinds of food, all free, in the middle (winning dish was the grilled ham and roquefort sandwich).

Immediately adjacent was a huge parking area where all of the team buses were parked, with the bikes set up outside and riders warming up for their rides. And all of this is only accessible to the press and a limited number of VIPs, including us!

As soon as we arrived, Tony and Del, friends from Australia, were keen to try to find Robbie McEwen, so we headed to the Katusha bus. This was early, so things were still quiet. We walked up and found McEwen sitting on the back of one of the team hatchbacks pulling on his shoes. He was super-nice, chatted with us and let us get several nice photos, including this one of him, Del and me. As soon as we took this, he jumped on his bike and started warming up.

Although we didn't get any other photos quite like this, we did see a lot of the riders as they came out and warmed up. Dave Zabriskie gave us a nice smile and a thumbs-up, while others were lost in their iPods.

Another great thing about having access to this area is the opportunity to ogle and drool over all of the bikes. And the time trial bikes are tricked out to the extreme and really fascinating to get right up close to. Many of them were using the new electronic shifters, but a surprising number were using regular manual equipment. Even though the team bikes are all matching, each rider does get to choose his own pedal and cleat system, which is an interesting detail that you'd never know without seeing the bikes up close.

When his start time comes, each rider simply hops on his bike and rides out alone through the parking lot and over to the starting area, where riders go through a chute ending in a place where the bikes are inspected and weighed. Then, it's a last chance for coffee (really!) or water, then up the ramp.

We saw several off, then boarded the buses again for the drive, about 45 minutes, to the town of Margaux, which was 30 km into the route and 22 km from the finish. Our tents were set up directly across the street from the Chateau Palmer, and I'm sure that French TV did one of its famous chateau flyovers, so I hope that Versus picked it up. The chateau is pretty easy to pick out, with four round towers at each corner. And our yellow tents right across the street!

Every couple of minutes, a police whistle from around the curve would signal, and then a motorcycle or two would appear, followed by the rider and his following team car. We knew from our rosters which rider was coming next, so we could be ready to get a photo, although even that was hard to time just right due to their fantastic speed going by.

Eventually, we saw all of the riders, including Schleck and Contador at the end, those last two surrounded by many, many vehicles and helicopters following overhead.

We went back to the bus and watched the last few riders finish on the TVs there, and then drove back to the hotel. We have dinner here tonight and leave for Paris early tomorrow morning on the bullet train, arriving in time to be at the finish line on the Champs Elysées, which is always exciting.