Team Tuesday filed for the record books, slowest kind

The panel notes, for the official record, that Iain, racing for Team Tuesday, completed the morning leg out in 20 minutes 45 seconds, an average of 23.3 km/h, under sunny skies and a temperature of 16°C. Nothing in the conditions explains what follows.

On Cemetery Drag, the seventh timed point of the stage, the rider recorded his slowest effort in seventeen attempts: 38 seconds, some 153% off his best mark there. The commissaires can offer no satisfactory explanation. The legs, by all other evidence, were not lacking; the timing chip does not lie, however inconvenient its findings. It is entered into the record as a curiosity rather than a crisis.

Elsewhere the stage proceeded with the metronomic regularity for which Team Tuesday are named. Benton Road and its various subdivisions were dispatched within the usual tolerances, some seconds down on prior efforts but nothing alarming. The bridge crossing, when it came, produced the sort of tyre-noise transition onto the pedestrian path that the panel is obliged to note is audible even from the commissaires’ car, though it yielded no incident worth further comment. The Quayside arrival, cobbles and all, closed proceedings without further deviation from form.

As to the wider Tour: this ride was, by the rider’s own recent standard, his fastest of three such efforts, and it has narrowed the gap to Team Monday, the team directly above Team Tuesday, from 10 seconds per 10 km down to just 2. The panel considers this a meaningful adjustment, however modest it may appear on the page. Team Tuesday remain fourth, still outside the top three they last occupied in week two, but the direction of travel is, for once, the correct one. At the summit, Team Friday’s command of proceedings continues undisturbed, a full 102 seconds per 10 km clear of Team Wednesday in second. The commissaires see no cause to revise that assessment today.