The Tour just switched translators yesterday. Seems that the long-time, diligent and reasonably competent holder of that job jumped to the Caisse d'Epargne team. Apparently she was a free agent. Anyway, things aren't quite as bad linguistically as they were early in the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing, when the translator got fired in open court, but there were some charming phrases that got lost both ways when Cancellara responded in either English or French.
Cancellara revealed that he still hasn't located his missing luggage, which went AWOL when he got to London for the start. He assumes someone "made himself a gift.'' He also was asked to comment on why the pace was so slow today. -- the stage took six and a half hours at an average 22.2 mph and got in more than half an hour past the slowest finishing time predicted by the race bible. "It was all the wind in the head,'' Cancellara said in English, disappointingly translated to the more boring "headwind" in French. Regardless, we know what he means. Talk radio does the same thing to us.
