Tour de France
Course design doesn't favor Armstrong

By The Associated Press and the Washington Post

MARK AKINS / THE SEATTLE TIMES/2003 Richard Virenque, wearing the yellow jersey, climbs Alpe d’Huez last year. His single day as race leader prompted an outpouring of French pride.

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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," Armstrong said from Liege, where the three-week race begins today.

So, 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 where Armstrong usually excels.

Today: Race coverage begins at 8:30 a.m. on Outdoor Life Network.

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, if it wins again, won't be able to do the damage it exacted last year. Then, the last team trailed USPS 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.

Organizers say the change should add excitement by ensuring that the team event doesn't kill the suspense early on.

The worries don't end there. One of the two main individual time trials will run up the agonizing 21-hairpin-bend climb to the L'Alpe d'Huez ski resort in the Alps.

That is a boon for mountain specialists who struggle to stay with 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 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 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 may be beyond his best. His 61-second win over Jan Ullrich at the finish last year in Paris was by far his narrowest and shakiest Tour victory, cracking the champion's aura of invincibility. "It's important that someone finally shows Lance that there's someone better," said Ullrich, the rider Armstrong professes to worry about most.

Another cyclist with his sights on toppling Armstrong is Mayo, who is coming off a win in June's eight-day Dauphine Libere.

Note

• An French appeals court yesterday rejected Armstrong's attempt to force a publisher to insert his denial of doping allegations into copies of a new book: "L.A. Confidential, the Secrets of Lance Armstrong."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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