Cycling Tour de France, fourth stage: The story of this stage was told by the waving banners on the course, the swishing cornfields and the ripples on the river Loire. A stiff breeze pushed the teams most of the way to Blois and the outcome was the fastest stage of the Tour, in any discipline, eclipsing Chris Boardman's record set in the Lille time-trial prologue in 1994.
"The faster I pedal the faster I can retire," quipped Lance Armstrong this week, and yesterday his blue-and-white-clad Discovery Channel team had clearly taken the message on board, as they do most of their master's orders. The nine of them covered the 42 miles up the Loire in one hour 10 minutes at an average speed of 35.825mph, whizzing in a perfect, single-line formation like a line of migrating ducks between chateaux and vineyards and cliffs of delicate, sunbleached yellow limestone.
This elegant little town with its finely turreted chateau had already seen the fastest road-race stage in the Tour's 102-year history, a record set in 1999 by the Italian Mario Cipollini at 31.471mph. Armstrong and his eight team-mates also overtook the fastest average for any team time-trial, which dated back to 1995.
The Texan did not look particularly comfortable, however, and the stage provided the first sighting of what is known as the "Dead Elvis grin": the corpse-like rictus, jaws locked, that marks Armstrong's face when he is suffering. Yesterday it was almost matched by his girlfriend, Sheryl Crow's, display of tensed dentistry as the CSC team came within two seconds of defeating her beloved.
The favourable wind also reduced the time gaps at the finish, simply because the differences in strength between team-mates in any given squad are less marked when it is such plain sailing. In any case, the rules that limit a team's losses in this discipline, to prevent the weaker teams being unduly penalised, meant Jan Ullrich, for example, had his T-Mobile team's 35-second loss on Armstrong capped at 30 seconds.
The outcome was that, though Armstrong increased his overall margin on all his rivals for that seventh win, he did not do so in definitive style.
The Italian Ivan Basso, the man he fears the most, limited his losses to two seconds along with the rest of CSC, apart from the unlucky yellow-jersey-wearer David Zabriskie.
Basso is now 1.26 behind Armstrong; Ullrich and his T-Mobile sidekick, the Kazakh Alexandre Vinokourov, also remain handily placed, 1.36 and 1.21 behind. Even the little climber Roberto Heras is less than three minutes behind after his Liberty Seguros team managed a fine fourth place.
The rulebook was not on Zabriskie's side, however, as the young American joined the elite group of unfortunates such as Boardman who have lost the yellow jersey because of an ill-timed crash. Though riders who fall off during road-race stages are credited with the time of their group if the crash happens in the final three kilometres, the rule applies only within the final kilometre in a team time-trial, and Zabriskie came down 1,500 metres from the line.
It was unclear precisely what caused him to tumble out of the CSC team's line, but it looked like a simple bike-handling error.
That, at least, was Armstrong's view: "Team time-trials are so hard, at the end everyone is on the limit and a bit cross-eyed. There were a lot of turns and a whipping wind, and it's easy to make a mistake like that."
Zabriskie's CSC team-mates felt differently, with their views perhaps coloured by the fact that his chute cost them the two seconds that lost them stage victory as they regrouped after he had gone down. "It was an unnecessary crash," said the German Jens Voigt. "We are bitter at losing the stage like that. We did everything right and lost in a stupid way."
The windblown banners told another story: many of them were expressing support for Paris's bid for the 2012 Olympics. While the Tour men continue eastward pushed by the same breeze that has blown them all the way from the Vendee coast, most of sporting France's minds will be in Singapore, focused on one of the few events that puts their great cycle race in the shade.
Guardian Service
