CYCLING TOUR DE FRANCE:FOR ABOUT a dozen minutes yesterday, Lance Armstrong had an arm through one sleeve of the yellow jersey. At the three-quarter checkpoint of a 39km team time-trial that began in Montpellier's elegant Place de la Comedie and ended outside the city's sparkling new rugby stadium, he and his Astana team-mates were looking at a time 38 seconds faster than the one already recorded by the Saxo Bank team of Fabian Cancellara, the overall leader of the Tour de France since the race began in Monaco on Saturday.
They needed only to push that advantage over 40 seconds in the remaining 10km to give Armstrong the jersey and complete a historic comeback for the seven-time winner, who announced his retirement four years ago but now plans, at the age of 37, to win it for an eighth time.
The Texan heard the news through his radio earpiece and drove the team hard. Given the speed at which they had been covering the course, whose narrow roads and tight bends had caused several crashes among the early starters, their success looked a certainty. Three of their riders had fallen away, but Armstrong, Alberto Contador and Yaroslav Popovych were taking long turns on the front of the group, pounding away to make up the small amount of time they needed.
As they approached the finish through cheering crowds, the machine-like precision of their riding gave way to an every-man-for-himself desperation. The team’s time is taken from the fifth man and the clock stopped at 46:29. This put them 18 seconds ahead of the next fastest team, Garmin-Slipstream, and exactly 40 seconds ahead of Saxo Bank, for whom Cancellara, the world’s best individual time-triallist, had spent most of the time pedalling away at the front.
The first five men in each team are all given the time of the fifth. So the cumulative individual times showed that Cancellara and Armstrong were now dead level, both with a time of 10:38.07 over the first four stages. Who would wear the yellow jersey?
Would it be Cancellara because, like a boxer or a defending Ryder Cup team, he already held it and it had not actually been taken away from him? Or Armstrong because he is, well, Lance Armstrong?
An official provided the answer. The results of Saturday’s individual time-trial, in which the times were calculated to a thousandth of a second, revealed that Cancellara had an advantage of 0.138 seconds. And so the Swiss rider kept the yellow jersey for the fourth day in a row, by the narrowest margin in the Tour’s history, and now seems likely to retain it until the weekend, when the race reaches the Pyrenees.
“It’s a little disappointing,” Armstrong said, “but that’s the way it is. At one point I thought we had it. Technically speaking we were as sound as we could be. I don’t have any regrets.”
He would lose no sleep, he said, over missing the chance to recapture the familiar feeling of having a yellow jersey on his shoulders. “It’s a long race,” he said. “Maybe there’s one in my future.”
GuardianService
** The Ag2r La Mondiale team of Nicolas Roche rode more strongly than was expected in the test, finishing ninth out of 20 teams. The French squad has not been known to fare as well in the group races against the clock, and so the 25-year-old will be satisfied.
Roche is now 48th overall, three minutes and 16 seconds behind Cancellara heading into today’s mainly flat, 196.5km run from Le Cap d’Agde to Perpignan.
