Saturday, July 3, 2004 Champ knows 6th Tour no lock
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New route, rules add challenge for Armstrong
By John Leicester The Associated Press
LIEGE, Belgium - It's a valid question: Did Tour de France
organizers design a course specifically to thwart Lance
Armstrong's drive for a record sixth win?
The course favors some of Armstrong's strongest rivals and
blunts some of his own particular strengths. But Armstrong
says he believes organizers are just aiming for spectacle.
Bottom line: The five-time champion thinks the best man will
win - and he's steeling himself for his hardest Tour yet.
"The race will be tight, will be very tough to win," he said
from Liege, where the three-week race begins today.
Where are the pitfalls?
Pick your spot. The 2,100-mile route has some Armstrong
rivals licking their lips in anticipation.
The biggest changes are in time trials, races against the
clock in which Armstrong usually excels.
New rules limit the amount of time squads can lose in the
team time trial on Day 5. That could hurt Armstrong,
because his winning U.S. Postal Service team last year used
the demanding and technical event to open up hefty gaps
over rivals.
Now, the slowest of the 21 teams will lose no more than
three minutes to the winners. The maximum loss for other
squads will be calculated on a sliding scale ranging from 20
seconds for the runner-up to 2 minutes, 55 seconds for the
next-to-last team.
If that sounds complicated, the vital point is that
Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service squad won't be able to do
the damage it exacted last year. Then, the last team trailed
them by nearly five minutes, and even the runner-up ONCE
squad was 30 seconds off the pace, giving Armstrong a
cushion for the rest of the Tour. Under the new rules,
ONCE's loss would have been cut to 20 seconds.
Jan Ullrich, Armstrong's biggest challenger, lost 43 seconds
to the Texan that day, a bad blow. Under this year's system,
the German would have lost just 30 seconds.
Organizers say the change should add excitement by ensuring
that the team event doesn't kill the suspense of the Tour
early on. But Armstrong's hardly delighted.
"I still, to this day, have a hard time understanding that
regulation," he said. "A team can lose 2 1/2 minutes in the
first half of the race and just decide to sit up and say,
'OK. We lose 2 1/2.'"
Armstrong's worries don't stop there. This year, one of the
two main individual time trials, in which riders race alone,
will run up the 21-hairpin-bend climb to the L'Alpe d'Huez
resort in the Alps.
That is a boon for mountain specialists who struggle to stay
with the speedy Armstrong when the race against the clock is
run on the relative flat, as both were last year and the
last one will be this year.
Armstrong is no slouch himself when it comes to climbing. In
2002, he won both of the Pyrenean stages that will be run
again this year, to La Mongie and the Plateau de Beille, and
he won at L'Alpe d'Huez in 2001. But he thinks Spanish
mountain man Iban Mayo will win there this year.
"The course is very good this year for climbers," said
Roberto Heras, a former teammate of Armstrong's who now
leads his own squad and could be a force in the Alps
and Pyrenees.
The Tour route changes each year, and a range of factors
goes into deciding where it will go. Organizers always take
the race through the mountains, but they also accept money
from towns that want to be on the route. Politics and
history also play a part, with organizers honoring former
riders by taking the Tour through their hometowns or, as in
1987, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, starting it in
what was then the divided Cold War city.
At 32, Armstrong admits he might be beyond his best. His 61-
second win over Ullrich at the finish last year in Paris was
by far his narrowest and shakiest Tour victory, cracking the
champion's aura of invincibility and giving his rivals hope
of dethroning him this year.
But no one is counting out such an experienced and
determined competitor.
"When you win five Tours in a row, it's because you have
very few weak points," Heras said.
Armstrong says the Tour route will still be a fair judge of
the top competitor.
"The organizers always design the course as well as they can
to make it interesting," he said. "I still believe that the
best man wins in Paris, and for me that's all that matters,
even if I'm second."
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