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He's known round our house as "Wee Bert Contador" on account of someone once describing him as "that wee lad who rides with Armstrong" last year.

2010 is going to be a bugger of a year for him if you believe some of the more partisan pieces of criticism of him, such as these two beauties from Versus:

Armstrong vs Contador - Wisdom vs Knowledge - Joe Parkin

Mass Exodus Leaves Team Astana in Shambles - Bob Roll

I can see where Joe is going with his piece, not that I entirely agree. Bob's I've gone long on salt with. Cyclocosm has done a great analysis, thus saving me the typing: Versus' War on Contador.

Which leaves me more time to marvel at the wheels on Wee Bert's new ride in Specialized's promo reel (neat use of CC subtitling btw) which I clocked over on Bianchista

De-badged Zipp 1080s is my guess. An utterly preposterous wheel to be be out on a training ride on. But he's Wee Bert, so he can get away with it.

I really hope he gets to this year's TDF in full form and without all the ball-ache of 2009. Not easy when co-habiting with Vino in a Kazakh team, but it can't be any worse than last year is supposed to have been, can it?

Ooooh to the eeM to the Gee!

Via Bikeradar

Also available on Vimeo

Here's a short Youtube clip from yesterday's stage 21 finish in Paris on Les Champs Elysees. We were in the press area up near the 100 metre board and I've never been so excited to be at a bike race.

Didn't see the mistake by Garmin or "Big" George Hincapie derailing their effort to break the Columbia train along Rue Rivoli but Cavendish's gap as they passed us was outrageous, at least ten metres and still growing.

Video never quite communicates just how fast they are travelling. It's only when the team cars come screaming past that you realise how insanely fast the peloton is travelling.

They cruise at the same speed that plenty of people descend big hills, faster than my flat out sprinting in a Tuesday night crit race.

Will try and get my photos from the Tour D'Honneur up later today. Annoyingly we had to leave before Garmin, Saxo Bank, Liquigas and Astana did their lap but I did get a great shot of Lance on his Damien Hirst.

Rober Millar isn't just Great Britain's best climber and Grand tour finisher, he's where my love of road cycling springs from and an inimitable icon.

The piece below has been doing the rounds of cycling fora over the last couple of days. It features Millar, late in his career, revisiting his home town of Glasgow with a French television crew in tow. Unsurprisingly, he's word-perfect in French and idiomatic with it to boot. That is quite some skill.

I've been trying to piece together my earliest cycling memories because I've always struggled to remember where the seed was planted that has lead to what is now a 20-year obsession with the Tour De France. I think it begins with the 1989 Tour and Robert Millar's stage 10 victory.

I've come to this conclusion because of the relics as much as anything: a Peugeot Equipe boy's racer which belongs to my brother. He also has somewhere a pair of Z-team mitts and I'm certain he had the jersey as well. That year Millar rode for Z-Peugeot.

I can vaguely recall being glued to the Channel 4 coverage that year as that was the year I won a scholarship to Bradfield College, but really I was more fascinated by cricket at the time. My mum's Guyanese, cricket to West Indians being a matter as serious as cycling is to Italians.

But I was jealous of my brother's bike and kit, that much I can remember. Millar's was nothing like it but every child dreams a bit to covers the gaps in reality. We probably tried to imitate Millar on the hill near our house that led up the railway bridge, me on my Mark 2 Raleigh Burner, him on the Peugeot or his Mark 2 Night Burner.

As the years went by I used to look at the Peugeot in the garage and think about riding more. But I ended up with a god-awful Peugeot mountain bike on which the backend was so poorly built that the wheel pulled off to one side under any pressure on the pedals. That put me off riding for ages.

When I rediscovered cycling I rediscovered Millar as well, a guy so cool he featured in The Face magazine at a time when it was the hippest thing in the newsagent.

Having once again looked out the window and considered that it was too cold and too wet for me to go out - I am still recovering from illness - Sunday was spent going for a gentle walk and catching up on the internet.

Props to Urban Velo for this delightful Stella Artois ad.

What's so great about it, other than it being a really great ad in the long tradition of Stella ads, is the details and the period of cycling it represents:

• unmade roads
• proper googles
• jerseys with pockets at the front
• refuelling in roadside bars
• repairing your own punctures
• caps not helmets

For me these are the sort of things I think modern cycling misses to some extent. The sense of adventure and challenge that you simply don't get in an environment where team cars and lycra exist.

Part of me would like to do the L'Eroica sportive this year to get a taste of the past. I'll hopefully be doing Flanders again this year, which is to my mind one of the rides that every cyclist should try at least once in their time.