Depending on who you listen to, Cadel Evans’ support squad is one of his strongest in years, or may as well be replaced by a bunch of undergrads testing out the sponsor’s anti-snoring medication.

While teams including Astana (no Schlecks), Rabobank (no Schlecks), Saxo Bank (two Schlecks) and Cervelo (no Schlecks and no Gerrans) announced all or part of their Tour rosters this week, Silence-Lotto stayed put, air coursing noiselessly through their clear nasal passages.

Of the remaining eight riders to join Cadel on the start line in Monaco on Saturday week, questions hang over several. How good is Sebastian Lang? Can Jurgen van den Broeck stay with Evans on the big climbs? Is even-toed ungulate Matt Lloyd recovered from April’s broken sacrum?

For his part, Evans has been going out of his way to talk up his team, something that can’t hurt his chances of shedding his reputation as a bit of a testy type.

At the very least, he will have at his elbow Charly Wegelius, a battle-hardened domestique with command of seven languages, including Finnish. Which will come in handy if, on the road to Mont Ventoux, Evans has to negotiate with a difficult Nokia salesman.

Marconi, schmarconi.

Besides Winston Churchill and the Archers, what have radios ever really done for us?

Ever since requiring four stitches after diving for cover during a particularly realistic broadcast of Hamish and Andy, the Broom Wagon has stuck to more traditional means. We get our music from the gramophone and our drive-time comedy from a troupe of travelling players that we pay to sit in the back of our jalopy, riffing hilariously on utegate, the chk-chk boom girl and the way women take soo-o-o long in the bathroom. It’s a logistically difficult way to commute, but in our opinion well worth the expense.

Tour sporting director Jean-Francois Pescheux is clearly cut from a similar cloth, announcing this week that the Tour will ban race radios – although only on two stages, and only in order to conform with the French highway code. Presumably, riders on these stages will also be obliged to give way to inebriated English tourists and socialists on tractors – as is our understanding of French traffic rules.

While tactics and independent thinking are obviously winners in the new scheme, safety is a potential concern. Pescheux is quick to point out that alternative technology* has always been able to warn riders of such common-or-garden Tour hazards as street demonstrations or roadside fires. Of course, the same can’t be said for runaway horses, but then every technology has its limits.

*shouting, a chalkboard, and more shouting.

Trawling the twitswamp so you don’t have to.

@iamtedking’s dad may not read twitter, but that doesn’t mean he should miss out on a message for American father’s day.

Unlike historical equivalents, @CadelOfficial’s latest nemesis is two inches deep, the size of a pancake and does not speak Spanish.

@RobbieHunter welcomes your holiday suggestions

@allandavis27 has been rooming with excitable Belgian Tom Boonen. It has been freaking him out a little. 

When @PaulSherwen was in Africa it was local proverbs by the twitload. Now that he is in Switzerland, nothing. Thankfully, the Broom Wagon’s Swiss colleague William Tell Army Knife Broom Wagon is on hand with suggestions: ‘To every fool his hat’, and ‘Who doesn't honour the Rappen isn't worth the Franken’.
 
The birds of the air honour the Franken with another resounding victory over earth-bound Charly Wegelius
 
It’s Armstrong, from Popovych and Contador – assuming that @taylorphinney’s Xbox tells a reliable fortune.

Wuthering Heights.

If a feud is not reciprocated except in a passive-aggressive, letter-to-the-newspaper sort of way, is it still a feud?

Classic YouTube.

He might boast a couple more layers of bark than any Tour de France winner in history, but let us not forget the power that once pulsed in the legs of this week’s winner of the Nevada Classic. Lance Armstrong blows away the field, including Jan Ulrich and Marco Pantani, on the Hautacam, in the rain.




The Broom Wagon was compiled by Matthew Price