TOUR DE FRANCE: Glory through suffering has been the Tour's leitmotif for 99 years, and yesterday's stage winner, the 24-year-old Norwegian Thor Hushovd, was in the best tradition. All Tour men have bad days, with the exception of Lance Armstrong, but few have as unpleasant or as public a bad day as Hushovd did two and half weeks ago on the road to Sarrebruck, on stage two.
With cramp paralysing his legs, Hushovd had to stop repeatedly so that team helpers could massage him. He could barely pedal and finished 18 minutes behind the peloton, just within the day's time cut. It has taken him a while to find his legs, but he rode strongly through the Alps in the last few days and was one of 10 men in yesterday's day-long escape over the hilly roads between the mountains and the Rhone.
As usual for a group without any contenders for the overall standings, they were given considerable leeway, and by the finish three had drifted away on the final 50 m.p.h. descent to the plains: Hushovd, the Dane Jakob Piil and Frenchman Christophe Mengin.
The sprint was classic cat and mouse between three slow men. Piil launched himself the first, but went haywire when his shoe detached itself from its pedal. Hushovd and Mengin hared off for the line, where the Norwegian took, by a whisker, his country's second stage win in this race after Dag-Otto Lauritzen in 1987.
Armstrong's fourth Tour is in the bag, but he is unwilling to let rest allegations of malpractice in his US Postal Service team, which began with an anonymous denunciation of the squad two years ago, and led to a long-standing investigation by a Paris judge. Her inquiries into the discovery of bin bags containing medical waste allegedly dumped by Armstrong's team assistants has been proceeding with the urgency of a disabled snail and, legal sources have said, will end this summer with a decision that there is no case to answer.
Yesterday, however, Armstrong said: "I think the case has been a joke from the beginning. Nowhere would have a case been started on those grounds, but in Paris they did. They knew the evidence was clean . . . they can keep it open but there is nothing there."
Armstrong has already attacked cycling fans who had yelled "dope" at him, and yesterday again had hard words for those doubting the probity of cyclists. "I don't know if our sport will ever be vindicated. I think it's a much bigger (thing) than me," he said.
"It's a question of cycling, of endurance sports and of Olympic sports and of professional sports. It's an epidemic. They're going to question when somebody breaks the 5,000 metre record on the track, they're going to question things in the swimming pool. The champions, the best and the record breakers will never be vindicated."
As a reminder of why some have turned cynical, yesterday produced another two-wheeled doping case, if not one related to this Tour, when the 2000 Giro d'Italia winner Stefano Garzelli was banned for nine months after testing positive for the diuretic probenecid during this year's Giro. He has also been fined £45,000.
