Basque dairy watch: Getting off to a bad start?

The day didn't start out right on Monday for the German teams in the Tour of the Basque Country. T-Mobile got an early wake-up call, as Bernhard Kohl explains at www.bernhardkohl.at: "The first stage didn't begin until the early afternoon, so we were all looking forward to sleeping late and recovering from the long journey here. But no: At exactly 7 a.m. we were torn out of bed and the whole team had to report to the doping controls."

Gerolsteiner's start was later but more hectic, writes Ronny Scholz (www.ronnyscholz.de): "We wanted to ride our bikes to the start, but got totally lost...instead of being on the normal road we ended up on the highway! Some of us climbed quickly into the team cars, another group including me rode on to the next exit." Obviously, though, the team was able to read the race map better than they had read the road map, as captain Davide Rebellin finished third in the first stage.