T of C Buckeye Awards:

Buckeyes are awarded to outstanding play on the football field to members of The Ohio State Football team. I am awarding Buckeyes to the following riders from this year's T of C:

• My first Buckeye is awarded to Ivan Dominguez who won the last stage of Tour of California yesterday in Long Beach. Ivan was a frequent riding companion of mine when I lived in So Cal and it was nice to see him get a win this year at T of C.

• Omer Kem gets my second Buckeye for his frequent television time in the early parts of the Tour. Although he had to pull the pin and DNF during Stage 3, he gave it a go during his 160km break away on Stage 2. Way to go Omer!

• Come to think of it, I am going to give my third Buckeye to the little team that could: Priority Health. For a smaller budget US domestic team, Priority Health showed themselves well during the T of C. In fact, were it not for the officials changing the rules on stage 1 and making the circuits neutral, PH rider Ben Jacques-Mayne would have been in the leader's jersey. Brian Sheedy held the first KOM jersey after the prologue, Omer had his stage 2 exploit, Tim Zirbell was at the top of the leader board for a while during the TT stage and B J-M got into the break in yesterday's final stage.

• My fourth Buckeye has to go to George Hincapie. The dude fell early during Stage 7 and, as it turns out, broke his wrist. He picked himself up, dusted himself off, chased back on and then proceeded to throw his considerable horsepower into the chase that finally brought back Stuart O'Grady's dangerous break away.

Buckeyes are not going out to:

• The officials who changed the rules extending the neutral section of stage 1 out past 3 km to go. Although I can see both sides of why they would do that I have to cry foul on this one.
• The guys driving the motorcycles for the camera crews. I want to know if I am the only one who noticed this, but at numerous times throughout the week I was noticing on OLN's coverage (I will never call it Versus), some pretty sketchy decisions being made by the moto drivers as to where and when they decided to pass the groups. The most glaring example was Sunday's stage when BMC was on the front and a moto came through a gap so small between the bunch and the dividing cones (what's up with that by the way, cones in a UCI race) that they clipped a cone and knocked it over. Fortunately the cone flipped away from the bunch.
  I will give a last Buckeye to the entire Tour of California. Here's hoping this event has some legs and will be around for many years to come!