Tour Salad: Stage 7

VeloNews | Stage 7 by the numbers

VeloNews sheds light on the day's most important question: “How do you spell the stage winner's name?”

VeloNews says the man himself prefers “Sergei Gontchar,” insisting it's misspelled on his passport, and therefore on Tour result sheets, as “Serhiy Honchar.” As recently as the Giro in May, VeloNews was using Sergei Honchar. OLN also goes with Sergei Gontchar. But interestingly, the T-Mobile team website uses “Serhiy Honchar.” To add to the confusion, there's an NHL player named Sergei Gonchar. CyclingNews asked the rider, and will switch to “Serguei Gonchar.” I'm going to stick with Sergei Honchar for now, no disrespect to the man who smoked the field today.

rec.bicycles.racing | Tour de France stage 7 summary

Bob Martin's daily summary points up what a dominant performance Honchar put on: He's the only person who gained time on the race leadership today. Landis lost the least: He's just 24 seconds farther from the race lead than he was last night. Most of the day's big losers were sprinters, but Levi Leipheimer dropped 37 spots. Jens Voigt will be looking for a friendly break tomorrow, as the CSC strongman finished DFL on the day, clearly looking forward to a better day.

Eurosport | Tales from the Tour: Lance on his way

Seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong will be in France for the Tour's final week. He told Suzanne Halliburton at the Austin American-Statesman:

“I'm not gonna run and hide like some other former champs might. With all that happened before the start, I feel as if the sport and even the event needs fans and supporters right now. It's not the time for me to run and hide. I need to stand up and say how great cycling and the racing is.”

rec.bicycles.racing | Chung Charts for stage 7 TT

The “Chung Chart” is a graph of rider performance over segments of a time-trial, traditionally with first-half speed on one axis, and second-half speed on the other. Robert Chung has traditionally posted these charts to rec.bicycles.racing, and they can sometimes show how the race broke down. The time checks weren't at the halfway point today, but the concept is the same. It's pretty clear: Honchar was about 2 kms/hour faster than everybody else over the whole course. That's a dominant performance.