CYCLING/TOUR DE FRANCE: Even by the standards of recent years, this is turning into a depressing Tour for the home nation, and spirits will not have been raised one millimetre after the announcement yesterday by last year's French darling, Laurent Jalabert, that this is his last Tour. He will retire after the world road championships in Zolder in October. William Fotheringham reports from Bazas
Since the retirement of France's last Tour winner Laurent Fignon in 1993, Jalabert and the disgraced then rehabilitated Richard Virenque have flown the tricouleur on the Tour. But Virenque's focus on la Grande Boucle, not to mention his downfall during the Festina scandal of 1998, has made "Jaja" France's only heavyweight on the two-wheeled world stage.
The point is amply made by looking at the overall standings after Monday's time trial: Jalabert had a disastrous day, losing time and concentration due to a puncture and slow wheel change, but he is still the only Frenchman in the top 40.
Today the Tour ends its 10-day stay on the flat. After the run through the Landes, there is one more stage for the sprinters - on Saturday - before the race hits Paris on Sunday week.
The Pyrenees await, and will be visible today. They hold special resonances for Jalabert, who won the King of the Mountains jersey there last year with a stage-long break en route to the Pla d'Adet ski station, but Lance Armstrong's defeat on Monday means they have taken on a whole new significance.
Thus far the race could best be described as a score draw.
Armstrong won the prologue time trial in Luxembourg, and his US Postal Service team performed far better than expected in the team time trial.
Monday's individual time trial, on the other hand, "was not entirely catastrophic, but could have been," he said yesterday. The same could be said of the tangle in the peloton which cost him 26 seconds on Saturday.
The time-trial stages are known as the "race of truth" but Monday's was positively Delphic in its verdict. Santiago Botero, the Colombian winner, was the Tour's best climber in 2000, but has not shown his best in the mountains since. If the ONCE duo of Joseba Beloki and Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano could be expected to be in the top 10 at this stage, as could Botero, given the time trialling strength he has shown in the last 12 months, there are two outsiders in the frame who can climb a little: the Lithuanian Raimondas Rumsas, and Armstrong's former mountain domestique Tyler Hamilton.
In 2000, Armstrong was in a similar position arriving in the Pyrenees. Then, he crushed the field in a rainstorm at the Hautacam ski station near Lourdes to win the yellow jersey, and was unstoppable thereafter.
Winning the first mountain stage of the Tour is as much an Armstrong staple as taking the long time trials, and he did this in 1999 at Sestriere in the Alps, and last year at l'Alpe d'Huez.
It will, he says, be "crack or attack." Who will do what is anybody's guess. Guardian Service.
