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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