I noted that as he went past me like i was stood still..........(its a joke.......just in case anyone thinks otherwise)

One of the course guys on a moped stopped and was obviously feeding back to the finish and said that whilst jalabert got out of the water very late he was making up time on the bike.......

As to the cheating. I am pretty sure that at least one of the lead women was being paced by a club cyclist not in the race. Either that or it was an amazing coincidence she ran in to a cyclist who stuck with her on a 20km climb...........

Edit: the likelyhood of this ever happening again is pretty much zero so i should note that today on one strava segment i was 7th to laurent jalabert's 6th and only 1 second behind him. (We will not discuss that i was 17 minutes and maybe 1700 places behind him on another segment today..........)