Between Lionel Birnie and Edward Pickering, CycleSport has been rocking the daily stage stories. Today, Pickering took to the keyboard, and gave us one of the best stage accounts I've read in quite some time. "Today was the day the racers took back the Tour," writes Pickering.

And then he goes on:

We were warned that the price of a much cleaner peloton might be a duller sense of adventure among the favourites, and the Pyrenees, where they rode up to Luz Ardiden and Plateau de Beille together, followed this pattern. But the Alps have been inspirational, a perfect advert for the sport.

First the peloton needed to learn to race clean. Once it did that, it needed to learn to race. The evidence of the last four days is that it has done both.

But that isn't the best part. Really, just go read the whole thing. It has all the urgent immediacy of the very best sportswriting. Che bello!