Cycling/Tour de France: As is customary on the Tour's second rest day, the sports daily L'Equipe asked all the team managers to predict the top three when the race finishes in Paris on Sunday. Apart from Ivan Basso's manager Bjarne Riis, who does not like such games, they speak with one voice: Lance Armstrong will win.
The collective collapse of the other favourites - Roberto Heras, Tyler Hamilton, Iban Mayo and, to a lesser extent, Jan Ullrich - means that behind Armstrong there is a new look to the list of candidates for a place in the top three and, just perhaps, overall victory should the great man stumble.
The theme that emerged in the first week of this Tour, when a fresh generation won stages and led the race, has been maintained, with a nuance. Armstrong's three closest rivals - Basso, Spain's Francisco Mancebo and the German Andreas Kloden - are older than some, have all been outside bets to finish in the top three of the Tour in the past but have matured slowly.
Basso and Mancebo are past winners of the best young rider's prize, the Italian in 2002, Mancebo in 2000. Kloden shone in 2000, taking the Paris-Nice "race to the sun" as well as the Tour of the Basque Country and a bronze medal in the Sydney Olympics road race, but he has been anonymous since then.
Basso has made the biggest impression simply because he alone has managed to cling on to Armstrong's wheel in both the Pyrenean mountain finishes, no mean feat in itself.
Basso bears a famous Italian cycling name but is no relation to the sprinter Marino, world champion in 1972. Apart from winning the world under-23 title in 1998, he has a reputation as a follower rather than a leader. When he left the Fassa Bortolo team last year after finishing seventh in the Tour his then team manager, Giancarlo Ferretti, dismissed him, saying he would "not pay big money to a rider who never won".
Whereas Ferretti is legendary for a big-stick approach to management, the enigmatic Riis, who won the Tour in 1997, has worked hard to build the young man from Lombardy's confidence.
The 26-year-old has also done specific training - which Riis undertook with Tyler Hamilton too last year - to make sure that Basso can hold Armstrong when he suddenly ups the pace on a mountain climb. Last Friday and Saturday it paid off in spades.
"I'm convinced that everything is still possible in the Tour, but we can't forget that Lance has won the last five," Basso said yesterday.
The only rider who has actually attacked Armstrong in this Tour is Mancebo, the latest product of the Navarran stable run by the former professional Jose Miguel Echavarri. Mancebo's move on top of the Col d'Agnes on Saturday was short-lived, but it was a rare flash of aggressive intent.
Kloden is the dark horse among the three, who has been thrust forward by the poor form of Jan Ullrich.
But the final 60 miles of today's stage through the Vercors to the ski resort of Villard-de-Lans has barely a level yard in it and in 1987, Stephen Roche's year, this is where the race was decided.
