The King and the Prince

They teamed up today to dispose of the one with aspirations to become the new queen of the pool. It seems they felt Melissa was getting too comfortable sitting on their cherished throne, so they decided to take it back. King Andy pocketed the stage win, his second of the Tour. He scored 400 points. That's the highest one day total in the pool so far. And the 385 points he scored on the first stage are the second highest. Something tells me the King is back. Prince Dan was not far behind. He tallied 390 points for second place on the day. Me, I've got no royalty whatsoever pulsing through my bloodlines. But I did manage to crawl onto the final podium step with a 340 point day. Melissa didn't have a bad day. She scored 240 points. But it wasn't enough to keep Andy from reclaiming the overall lead. He's back atop the standings with a lead of over 100 points. Melissa drops into second. But it looks like the two of them are starting to distance themselves from the rest of the field. Third place is another 150 points back of Melissa. That spot no longer belongs to Brad the Impaler, who'd been holding onto it since the very first stage. He had a bad day today and dropped all the way down to 7th place. Third place now belongs to The Professor, Chris O. He moved up five spots today to get himself into the top three. The distance between 3rd place and 20th is just 200 points, which is less than the gap that separates 1st and 3rd. So you can expect a lot of shuffling around amongst the top 20 over the next several stages.

In the real race, it was finally an opportunity for the hardmen of the spring to strut their stuff. Thor Hushovd powered up the final ascent to take the victory ahead of Oscar Freire and J.J. Rojas. At which point a faint chorus of "Thor SMASH" could be heard echoing throughout the city Winnipeg as all of RRR simultaneously belted out an euphoric cheer for their favourite rider. David Millar gave it a go today. For a while it looked like he might hang on. But in the end he came up short of a stage win as the peloton caught him with 1.5 km to go. After all that work, he actually went backwards today. He lost his spot in the top 10 and fell all the way to 20th in the overall GC. There were plenty of late stage crashes today as the rain sent riders sprawling all over the road into Barcelona. The most significant causualty was Mick Rogers. He will remain in the Tour but his GC hopes are done after he finished over 13 minutes back. Tom Boonen also went down. I wonder if Quick Step wishes they'd just left that original ruling alone. Boonen's Tour has been nothing short of a nightmare so far. Tune in to Pez for more.

Results and standings here.