Graham Watson's observations on LA website re: today's dynamics:
"What part Lance and his team played in today’s racing is hard to say, but he seemed to enjoy the discomfort experienced by Levi Leipheimer, Alexandre Vinokourov and Floyd Landis as they watched Inigo Landaluze race away into the yellow jersey and threaten their teams’ overall plans to win this race. The fact is,
neither Gerolsteiner, Phonak or T-Mobile had the organisation to chase down Landaluze and his fellow escapers, and they probably have
become complacent assuming Discovery Channel would chase the break down for them. But Lance wasn’t playing that game today, and his rivals were left looking rather stupid in Grenoble, for Landaluze is now quite a threat overall, and may take some shifting as he can climb as good as almost anybody in this race when he has to."
"It is fun and slightly mischievous to consider that in the big escape of the day, at least half of them are known to be
chummy with Lance. Juan Antonio Flecha and Axel Merckx are two of his closest buddies, and add the fact that his own teamate Benjamin Noval was in the break as well, you can then hypothesize that Lance and his team had quite a hand in letting that escape get away – and then sat back and watched the others struggle to comprehend what was going on.... But all in all, it was a strange day’s racing, at the end of which I knew less about bike-racing than when the day started."