Last Day of Tour - no racing?

I know it is traditional that the final stage into Paris is not competed. It seems to be a gentlemens agreement that whoever has the yellow at that point is allowed to keep it without challenge, making the run into Paris mostly a party, with a little bit of final sprinting by the specialists.

I find myself wishing that the 23-seconds could have been challenged this year. I know it would have been tough, but with some cooperation from some other teams, maybe Cadel or Levi could have made up the difference. I would love to have seen one of those heroic individual performances to vault one of them up to a challenging position. I don't have a great understanding yet of all the nuances of the strategy involved, but 23 seconds just doesn't seem like that much.

I am also a NASCAR fan. I just can't imagine 42 drivers allowing Kevin Harvick to win the race because he went in to the last lap with the lead. In fact, Harvick entered the last lap of this years Daytona 500 in seventh place, but made a tremendous charge out of turn 3 and ended up beating Mark Martin for the victory by a margin measured in thousandths of a second. Obviously, there is a lot of difference between a 200 mph stock car and a 40 mph bicycle, but I would have loved to see that kind of intensity in this years final stage.