Watch out for those cars

It's not an easy job, fetching all those water bottles. Milram's Christian Knees discovered that Thursday, the hard way. At the end of the Col des Aravis descent, "I fell back to the team car to get a bottle," Knees wrote in his Tour diary at www.radsport-aktiv.de. "One the way back up of course I had to go by all the cars. As I rode by one team car, the driver honked. He wanted to pull by and was warning the car in front of him. I just assumed that he had seen me riding next to him. Wrong! He suddenly pulled to the left and just knocked me down.

"I was really lucky: scrapes on my bottom, leg and shoulder. My helmet was broken in two. That could have been a lot worse! I got my breath back and yelled at the driver. The fans who were standing there and saw the whole thing were all shocked, too."