Chicken running away?

Nobody can run with the Chicken right now when the road turns up. Nobody except Alberto Contador, who's turning out to be the revelation of this year's TdF. Contador moves into 2nd overall, ahead of Evans, who lost almost 2 minutes to the stage winners, and falls to 3rd place. Leipheimer has moved into 4th, giving Discovery a very interesting 1-2 punch, which they played to perfection yesterday. It's been a long time since the Tour was won by a pure climber. But it looks like that's what may be happening this year. As much as I'm rooting against Rasmussen, it's actually pretty exciting as far as the race itself is concerned.

More from CN, VN, and Pez.

Rachel has both members of Disco's two-pronged attack, and so takes the stage win. This gives us 9 different stage winners so far. Cheryl, James, Jonny B, Jonny G still have yet to get in on the glory.

I'd already resigned myself to Matt's crushing victory in the pool. Now I'm working at coming to grips with losing our side bet as well--that nobody on his team would crack the top 10. Rasmussen doesn't look to be fading away any time doon, despite almost everyone's expectations. Also not going away is the cloud of questions arising from the story of his box of bovine blood. Sounds like the UCI may still be working to boot him from the race, on grounds of the "ethical code." But they seem to be waiting for Whitney Richards to provide some further evidence, or at least a witness, to corroborate his story. We do not have a rule about what to do if a rider gets kicked out of the race. Should his points count? Hopefully that's a question we won't have to adress at this point. But this whole scenario kind of sucks. David Millar, for one, isn't impressed.

Stage 14 results:

1) Rachel - 240
2) Jonny B - 217
3) Johnny S - 199
4) David L - 148
5) Matt - 125
6) Jonny G - 125
7) Charlene - 103
8) James - 65
9) Cheryl - 57
10) Chris - 46
11) David S - 31
12) Vic - 11
13) Hal - 0

General Classification after stage 14:

1) Matt - 2211
2) Jonny G - 1353
3) Chris - 1263
4) David L - 1107
5) James 0 1061
6) Hal - 946
7) Charlene - 904
8) Rachel - 882
9) Cheryl - 881
10) Vic - 834
11) Johnny S - 694
12) Jonny B - 644
13) David S - 473