Internet TdF Game: News

The website for 2010 has gone live today. Although it is far from complete, you can already enter your team for the competition. Good luck!

Tom Boonen and Nicolai Trusov have now been confirmed as starters in the Tour de France 2009 by the official race website.

The official list of riders has been announced by Cyclingnews.com

Changes with respect to the list that was available on this site:

• C. Wegelius replaces the suspended T. Dekker (Silence Lotto team)
• M. Maaskant replaces D. Martin (Garmin Slipstream)
• B. Vandborg replaces B. Bach (Liquigas)
• J. Roy takes the ninth spot in the Francaise de Jeux team
• full Caisse d’Epargne team available
• full BBOX Bouygues Telecom team available
• the Cyclingnews list lacks number 168, is it Trusov?
• added missing R. Feillu (Agritubel)

Important non-starters: Samuel Sanchez (Euskatel Euskadi), Ivan Basso (Liquigas), A. Valverde (Caisse d’Epargne), Damiano Cunego (Lampre NGC), Robbie McEwen (Team Katusha) , Erik Zabel (Team Milram), Alessandro Petacchi (LPR Brakes) and Danilo di Luca (LPR Brakes).

The situation of Tom Boonen (Quick Step) is unclear. He does not appear on the starting list but there is a court order which says he can start.

Please note that sprinter Sebastien Chavanel will not compete this year. However his brother Sylvain Chavanel (listed in the game as S. Chavanel) will be present.

The 2009 site has gone online today. Have fun!

Today, Riccardo Ricco was removed from the race after failing a drugs test. He had already won two stages. The race director may decide to strip him from these stage wins and award them to the second-placed finisher. However, this will not affect the Tour de France game. The earlier game results will not be changed.

In general game results will not be influenced by changes that become known more than 24 hours after the stage has finished. It would simple take too much time and effort. An extreme example is the Landis case of 2006. One year after the race finished it still was not certain whether his disqualification was correct or not. It would not be desirable to wait a year before having the final result of the TdF game.

And the game has started. The number of participants is down by 50% compared with the last edition. However, with more than 400 people we still have enough folks to make it an interesting game.

Congratulations to Gary Timberlake from Canada for winning the first stage!

The riders list has been posted on the site of SteepHill. Thus far I have found two differences with the list poster earlier on this site:

• Quick Steps’s Kevin van Impe was replaced by Mauro Facci.
• Gerolsteiner’s Oliver Zaugg was replaced by Heinrich Haussler

The cyclist list has been updated.

Added teams of Caisse d’Epargne, Lampre and Credit Agricole to the cyclist list as well as the ninth cyclist of Sanier Duval. The list is complete now. However some late changes are possible between now and Saturday morning.

Today the web pages for the Internet Tour de France Game 2008 have gone online. I’m sorry for having you made waiting so long, guys.

Everything is the same as in the previous years. The scoring system is the same as always and the stages of the first weekend will not be used so you have the time until Monday July 7 to submit your team. I have put less time in consulting different websites for the expected starters and just copied the list available at Wikipedia. Only three teams are without riders now.

Good luck to you all!

The problem which prevented new posts from being added to the blogs on this site, has finally been solved. It turned out that it was more severe than we had estimated. Not only did the posting service break down but also other parts of the blogs, for example the commenting system. Basically no new information could be added.

A request from help to the Internet provider, XS4ALL, quickly resolved the issue. It turned out that during a mysql database restoration by sysadmin some table options had not been restored from a dump. In our case this affected the auto_incrementoptions present in all the WordPress blog tables: they were gone. Because of this, all new items added to the tables failed to receive proper id values. In fact, new id values now always were zero, something which the software could not cope with.

XS4ALL supplied us with a mysql command for restoring the auto_increment options:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts MODIFY ID bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT;

After running the command on the blog tables, everything is working again. Great!