Last month’s Tour de France route announcement, charting the path Lance Armstrong hopes to take to a record-breaking sixth victory, required a while to digest. It’s tempting to try to predict the dramatic arc of the race by drawing lines on the map, but the event isn’t defined that easily.
Last year, one of the most compelling Tours of the last few decades saw a principal plot development in Stage 1–the crash at the end of a “meaningless” sprint stage that kept Tyler Hamilton off the podium.
The first individual time trial, regarded as a virtual gimme for Armstrong, instead proved to be his scariest day of the Tour as he suffered dangerous dehydration.
Armstrong’s Spanish rival, Joseba Beloki, was KO’d by a wreck during a descent in the Alpine foothills few riders (or writers) would have considered critical while scouting it. So to the speculation about the mountains coming later next year, or the oddity of a time trial up Alpe d’Huez in the last week, I say: no matter how you shuffle the stage cards, the poker game remains the same for aspiring winners. Stay out of trouble early, make trouble for your opponents in the mountains and hold your own in the time trials.
Where to? As usual, it’s all about the sprinters early on. The peloton will wheel around cycling-besotted Belgium for a few days before crossing into France for a stage that includes some of the same cobblestone streets that are part of the famous Paris-Roubaix race.
The Tour glides across northern France to Brittany, also passionate cycling turf, then hopscotches to the Massif Central for warm-up climbing–and breakaway victories by solo artists–before the Pyrenees. Stage 13 might be the hardest day of the race, with five climbs totaling 48 miles and a finish on Plateau de Beille, where Armstrong won two years ago.
Much of the toughest racing, and presumably suspense, is back-loaded onto four of the final five competitive days: three in the Alps, including the uphill time trial, and the conventional time trial in Besancon.
Other than the opening prologue time trial and the Stage 4 team time trial, overall contenders will have little to do in the Tour’s first 12 days aside from ducking headwinds and staying intact. Did I mention this is trickier than it sounds?
No jokers wild: The Tour’s eight wild-card teams will be named March 1, two months earlier than usual, and selected for their “strength on paper” rather than early season results. (The first 14 teams are determined on the basis of world rankings.)
This may be an indication race organizers will change their approach. Director Jean-Marie Leblanc has taken heat in past years for doling out wild cards to mediocre French teams instead of making room for entries with stellar if one-dimensional leaders like Italian sprint king Mario Cipollini.
We would help our boys, too, if this were the Tour of U.S.. But the boost hasn’t helped the lower tier French teams evolve into more. They have won a few scattered stages but have yet to produce a successor to Bernard Hinault, the last French Tour champion (1985).
Yes, the stud sprinters tend to quit before the climbing begins, somewhat undermining the concept of the race as a marathon. But if the first half of the Tour is going to be constructed as a sprinters’ showcase, it makes sense to have the best in the world present.
Mt. Moby: The 2004 Tour’s most notable omission is fearsome Mont Ventoux, the great white whale of a summit where Armstrong never has won. Could race organizers want something to help lure the Texan back in 2005?
Whether loved, resented or tolerated by the French masses, Armstrong’s continued presence guarantees the Tour an international celebrity, keeps global sponsors happy and keeps attracting converts in the vast and formerly oblivious market otherwise known as the United States.
