Everybody is complaining about today's stage, but everyone's going to watch it regardless. My question for all of the whiners: Why bother watching at all?
I actually like bunch sprint finishes, although yesterday's finish gave me the creeps. The nervousness at the front was immense, even Cavendish was literaly pushed from his train multiple times (of course, he repaid the pushers with some head pushes himself). I guess it was bitter luck that they held out until the last corner. The last couple of kilometers were not boring at all, that is, if you love sprinting and sprint preperation anarchy.
Judging from the stage profile, there are two sharp corners in the three kilometers in today's stage. Judging from that, I don't think we are going to see a clean finish today. That might just give Farrar his chance of winning for Wouter, although Cavendish has the skills to make it through almost anything.
The first of those sharp corners is a 90 degrees left turn, with, of course, a traffic refuge as you come out of the corner. I wonder what they are going to do with that: They can either seriously narrow the road there or leave it as it is which will cause a fight for the inside corner. Luckily the riders had two previous laps to inspect the situation.
Then, some 650 meters down the road, another tight 90 degrees corner, to the right this time, on a junction laden with refuges. From that corner, it is still 1.6 km to the finish, with only a very gentle right at 1.4 km to go.
The local lap has some other tight turns, but they are farther from the finish. There's a 'turning' zone at 7-4.7 km to go, which may cause some crashes, but we'll see.
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