Floyd wins it!!!

Floyd Landis with a really amazing performance on the mountain stage 17 and with a fairly strong performance in the individual time trail on stage 19 won the tour de France. He won over second placed Oscar Pireiro by 57 seconds and over 3rd placed Andreas Kloden by a minute and 29 seconds. Carlos Sastre was relegated to 4th.

Kloden also had a really good time trail and pushed Sastre down to 4th place to take the podium finish. But Oscar Pereiro gave a performance of a lifetime to cling on to second place. It looked as if Kloden would end up 2nd but Pereiro held on.

Overall a good tour because it remained open ended for so long and so many new people had a chance to shine. But since people like Lance Armstrong, Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso were missing the whole tour lacked in experience and acted as school kids on certain stages. Take the fact of Oscar Pereiro gaining 30 minutes in one stage and then Floyd Landis losing 10 minutes on one day and gaining 8 of them back on the next! The Peloton lacked leadership in such situations and acted a little immaturely in letting these things happen. If the big guns had been there they would have never let such things happen...

In closing, Floyd (who hails from San Diego and has an Amish upbringing) completed Le Tour '06 in 89 hours 39 minutes and 30 seconds covering 3657.1 kilometers (including two mountain ranges, the Pyrenees and the Alps) at an average speed of 40.784!!!