… these numbers reflect, in my opinion, an overall lowering of the performance level in the Tour compared to the last 2 decades. And this is a positive sign that doping control measures are having an effect.

that’s Ross Tucker, from Cape Town, in his blog The Science of Sport: Power outputs from the Tour de France.

I put forward the opinion a few months ago that the unpredictability at the Giro d’Italia, with riders losing big chunks of time, and even strong teams being unable to control the race, was a mark in favour of the idea that there’s less doping. And Ross puts up the numbers that seems to show performance has worsened. That’s a good thing.

The Goat Track, originally uploaded by nicholas.odonnell.

Nick captures some fine cycling action. This is local racing legend Steve George on the Goat Track.

So after a fun evening in Allora, including learning a card game called ‘May I’, we gathered ourselves up to launch forward towards Koreelah. At this point, you (my imaginary reader) may well be saying to yourself: Where the hell is Koreelah?

That’s a good question, and I don’t think I really know the answer. We just rode all day and got there.

The second day saw us heading towards Yangan and Killarney on some pretty quiet back roads. I got first shift in the car, so some of the excitement of the morning came from lending my titanium-framed road bike to JF. He really enjoyed riding it.

I decided my method of ‘providing support’ from the van would be to go on ahead of the three riders, park the car and jump on a bike and ride back towards them. The level of ‘support’ offered would be minimal, but if required, I could always go back to the car which would be at the most 10km away.

With this modus operandi I met the group twice in the morning’s ride, once near Freestone, and later on about 8km out from the lunch spot of Yangan.

For the second day in a row, Sholto and I managed to subvert John’s plan of making lunch from pre-purchased ingredients. Sholto went for the most massive burger available in Yangan, and of course i had some hot chips. It was winter on the Darling Downs, remember, and after a morning’s ride, nothing is better than hot chips.

After lunch I got back on the bike, and Sholto took the wheel of the van. We rode to Killarney by early afternoon. The plan for the day was just to ride down to Koreelah, which over the border in NSW. From Killarney, its south to Legume, then east and south to Koreelah.

But I put the challenge out to Bill … surely we had time for a side-trip of about 22km for the climb to Queen Mary Falls. In John’s original planning we were staying over the hill from Queen Mary Falls. But in the final draft, we were missing the climb altogether.

With plenty of daylight up our sleeve, Bill and I decided to ride up to the Falls. JF would continue on the route as per plan. Sholto eventually decided to drive the support car to the base of the climb, and then chase Bill and I up the hill.

So Bill and I made it up the climb to QMF, and went for a saunter to view the Falls. When we came back we were surprised to find Sholto waiting for us at the picnic grounds. So the three of us rode back down the hill together, and Sholto jumped back in the car to head off to Koreelah.

Bill and I enjoyed the ride over the border and past Acacia towards Legume. Beautiful country side. Once we left Legume, the road surface began to deteriorate, but the scenery was no less gorgeous.

We found this to be typical of this area of northern NSW over the next two days. The road surface was terrible on so many places, with massive potholing and poorly repaired bitumen. But we were riding through such lovely country we didn’t mind.

We arrived at the turn-off to Koreelah to find JF waiting for us. And about 5km of dirt road into Kumbee Homestead B&B. No problem, we set off on the dirt road, which started with a major downhill. Much to JF’s horror, Bill and I flew down this hill. John followed at a much more sedate pace.

We all made it to Kumbee Homestead, a fantastic location by the way, without either a dirt-road caused mechanical or accident, so there was no need for alarm!

End of Day 2.

So, let’s go back to Johnno’s June Journey.

At the end of the day, the favourites lost 12 minutes, a massive amount of time. Plenty of finger pointing about who messed up, but it doesn’t really matter. Richie Porte, from Tasmania, a neo-pro in his first Grand Tour, has the maglia rosa, and a minute and some over David Arroyo, a Spanish climber.

Although the day was terrible from Cadel’s point of view, it’s making for a great race. And I think there are some positives for cycling as well.

A race in which there are no dominant teams, means that riders are more willing to attack, which absolutely makes for exciting racing. But it may also show that the peleton is racing cleaner than previous years.

One of the big advantages of an EPO-fuelled rider is quick recovery. They can ride day after day at the same level. Without it, riders are mere mortals like the rest of us. Super-fit and superb athletes, but not automatons. They get tired.

And combine that with rainy weather in Italy, and the demanding parcours of the Giro, and this is what you get.

So now there’s no clear favourite to win this Giro. Porte is untested, Arroyo has never been a GC contender before either. You have good all-rounders like Efimkin and Gerdemann in the top 10, but they are minutes back.

And Sastre, Wiggins, Vino and Cadel all have major minutes to catch up. Who knows how it will end? Not me, that’s for sure. But it’s going to be fascinating!

Vino (right) and AC … here we go again?!

Alexander Vinokourov has, to use a Liggettism, set the cat among the pigeons. His win in last weekend’s Liege-Bastogne-Liege was straight out of the classic Vino repertoire — attack when nobody’s expecting it, and press home your advantage by continuing the attack all the way to the finish.

Well, so what? He’s a smart rider, a class rider as his palmares clearly shows. He’s also a drug cheat, but quite frankly he’s not the only rider in the peloton to return after suspension. Of the riders who have returned from suspension, Vino is quite possibly the only one who is tasting success at anywhere near the level they had before getting busted.

But the successful return from drug suspension is merely the latest phase in the fascinating career of Alexander Vinokourouv. And he is now a key figure in the drama of the biggest bike race in the world, the Tour de France.

A quick bit of background. Vino comes from Kazakhstan, and races for Astana, a team registered in Kazakhstan. The team was first set up in 2006, built around Vino. At the time, just at the end of the Armstrong era, it seemed a possibility that Vino could win the Tour, perhaps more than one.

But instead he, and several other Astana riders, most notably Andrei Kasechkin, were booted out of the Tour for blood doping.

Since then, the Astana team has continued, and has been successful, especially in the Grand Tours, with riders such Alberto Contador, Levi Leipheimer, and of course Lance Armstrong, for last year’s eventful Tour de France.

Well this year Lance has wrested control back of his team (Radioshack), and his directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel, and his super-domestiques Leipheimer, Chris Horner and Andreas Kloden.

But Alberto Contador, indisputably the best stage racer in the world, has remained with Astana. He’s seen off Lance Armstrong, so he is a strong character. How will he go in the same team as Alexander Vinokourov?

Well, lets have another look back at history to get some perspective on how this might play out. In the first half of the noughties, Vino raced for Team Telekom, the German-registered team whose number one rider was the German hero/anti-hero Jan Ullrich. Ullrich was never able to live up to his super talent, and facing the incredible will of Lance Armstrong, was never able to overcome Armstrong to win the Tour.

And towards the end of his time at Telekom, it seemed to most observers that Vino was tired of being second fiddle to Ullrich, and was racing for himself rather than being part of a co-ordinated effort to beat Armstrong.

And so it seems that we approach the 2010 Tour de France, that Vino is set to replay the role which once stifled him: loyal team-mate, this time for Alberto Contador. After Liege-Bastogne-Liege, he even said as much in his press conference, playing down his own prospects in the Tour and talking up Contador’s.

And yet, Vino just isn’t that sort of rider. Yes, he is a brilliant tactician, but until now always for furthering his own cause. And never forget that Vino is a Kazakh, the most famous Kazakh in the world and a national hero, racing for a Kazakh team. Do you think the people of Kazakhstan want him to play the role of loyal lieutenant to Contador? Not if he has even the remotest chance to win himself.

So for a second year in a row, Contador will go to the Tour as the favourite, but with no certainty about how whether he has the whole-hearted support of his team.

Unlike Lance Armstrong (Radioshack) and Andy Schleck (Saxo Bank), who know that they have the total support of every rider, every staff member in their team.

Of course Armstrong is nowhere near the rider he was when he won seven Tours in a row. Contador has the snap, the jump on climbs that among today’s GC contenders only Andy Schleck can match. And Schleck’s not in the same class as Contador in a time trial.

There’s still a couple of months until the Tour. And the Giro could be exciting as well, especially if Cadel Evans can muster the form and the team support to have a real go at the title.

But after Liege, I can’t help thinking that Alberto will be on the phone back home to Mum & Dad and his brothers back in Spain, saying: “You won’t believe it. It’s just like last year all over again. I’ll have to win the Tour on my own!”

I think he will, by the way. He is just that good.

I don’t ride my bike into the city during rush hour because I’m “concerned with the environment;” I do it because pretending I’m riding down the gullet of a giant salmon on a spring day is awesome, and sitting in traffic for two hours listening to terrestrial radio and then trying to find parking sucks. Being human and doing what makes you truly happy makes the world better; being “concerned” yields two toxic by-products: religion, and smugness.

So if I advocate anything (which really I don’t, since who the hell am I anyway?), it’s doing what makes you happy.

BikeSnobNYC captures one of my key points about cycling advocacy. Being worthy and green and all that stuff is (probably) fine. But I ride a bike ‘cos I like riding a bike. It’s fun and I like having fun. Every day!

OK, so you’ve not ridden a mountain bike in a serious race before? OK, so you’re in pre-season training before you go back to Europe. Fair enough.

OK, so according to you, you suck at riding single track. Sure, sure.

OK, so as part of your pre-season, you enter the Australian National Road Race championships, and solo off the front for seven laps of a 10.2 km course, just to get some hard kms into your legs.

And at the Otway Odyssey, against Australia’s finest and best prepared mountain bikers, you ride away on the fire roads to win by over five minutes.

And by the looks of this photo at the finish line, you would barely blow out a candle.

Judith Arndt, you rock.

(Those with long memories will remember Judith finished with a silver medal in the Athens Olympics road race behind our very own Sara Carrigan. On that occasion she was so angry about the exclusion of her partner Petra Rossner from the German team that she gave a single finger salute as she crossed the line, aimed at German Olympic selectors, apparently, but there for all the world to see. This is a woman with attitude.)

Saturday morning was a great road ride with Group 1 of the South Bank bunch, down to Wynnum via Cleveland. The pace was on early, and we shed a couple of riders over Camp Hill. Then it ramped up further as we got a bit tangled up with a small group of four which was slightly faster than our group. Anyway it all mixed in together from Belmont out through Alexandra Hills.

By the time we wound it up on the Wynnum Esplanade I was feeling like my form was as good as it’s ever been. Got swamped in the sprint, but it was fun anyway.

On Sunday afternoon Bruce and I went for a spin in Daisy Hill quite late. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the trails were well-attended. Quite a few times we had to give other riders a head start on trails so as not to catch them halfway along a singletrack section. The Haro felt good, my timing seemed good.

So as quite a few of my friends take on Grafton-Inverell, I will be slogging up a monster climb on my mountain bike. It’s going to hurt, and its going to be great. You can’t have one without the other!

Me and Bruce ready to ride in the Bike for Bibles 'universities tour' in 1991.

Bruce emailed me this photo, with the subject ‘Has anything really changed?’

Of course, the answer is no. Bike riding is still fun!