A fine competition today. Cunedo has surprised me.

Some team managers will retrospectively rue their wrong decisions.

First, they should have known that Pereiro was better then his rank showed when they let steal him 30 minutes at one etappe. Each of the teams could easily have halved that time in the last hour.

Second, they (Kloeden's team and Sastre's team) made the wrong decision not to go after Landis the day before yesterday. In interviews they said that they didn't believe he could keep up his speed for so long. He actually couldn't, for he was a bit slower on the last ascent than the others, but only so slightly. In this case, I'm not so sure that the teams could have prevented Landis taking so many minutes from them, strong as he was that day. The mistake was that they didn't even try and instead relied upon Landis having miscalculated his strength. Both team managers said that they looked at the respective other team and when that team didn't react they relied upon that judgement. It's a classical case of if you don't do the hard work I also can't be bothered and in the end both lose.

Again, nothing will happen tomorrow that could change the first ten positions.

Wolfgang