The first week of the Tour is always a battle between the sprinters and the breakaway specialists the French call baroudeurs. The term refers to soldiers who fight as much for honour as victory, and in recent years the baroudeurs have gained only the former as the sprinters' teams have let them hang out front before sweeping them up in time for the finish.
Yesterday, however, the score went 4-3 to the baroudeurs after the Italian Paolo Bettini took the stage with the peloton breathing hot on his heels.
Bettini escaped with the Frenchman Didier Rous, the Belgian Rik Verbrugghe and the Spaniard Jose Angel Vidal, and the quartet seemed destined to be devoured with the finish in sight, but inexplicably the chase eased, permitting them to scrape home.
Bettini wore the polka-dot jersey awarded to the King of the Mountains earlier in the week, and he was scrapping for it again yesterday on roads that were a mini-gastronomic tour in themselves, beginning with the Buzet vineyards and the town of Roquefort and ending among asparagus fields.
The fight for the measled vest shows the tone of the race so far. Bettini's strength is climbing short, steep hills - he won the hilliest one-day World Cup Classic in April - but the man whom he relieved of the polka-dot jersey, the German sprinter Marcel Wust, is a flatlander, as is the current King of the Mountains, the Dutchman Erik Dekker, Saturday's stage winner at Villeneuve de Agen.
Theirs has been a sideshow that will seem irrelevant today, when the mountain business suddenly becomes serious. If Marco Pantani or Richard Virenque is to have any chance of winning this Tour de France, they must make their moves on the cliff-bound Pyrenean amphitheatre of the Col du Soulor and the ski station at Hautacam, both more than 5,000 feet above sea-level.
The weather may well add to the suffering. A 40 m.p.h wind and a temperature of just 6 degrees Celsius is forecast for the top of the Soulor. In these conditions, breathing is difficult, systems have to fight cold as well as gradient, and for men with anorexic levels of body fat, the descents will be freezing and dangerously slippery. This will delight Pantani, who forged his 1998 Tour win in bitterly cold rain in the Alps.
Pantani and Virenque will have their eyes on the gap of just over five minutes - time lost in the opening time-trial stage and last Tuesday's team time trial - which separates them from Lance Armstrong, last year's winner.
Armstrong is no slouch in the conditions the race may encounter today either but if the tight hairpins on the descent from Soulor's neighbouring col, the Aubisque, are slippery, Armstrong's mental strength will be tested to the limit. In May, while reconnoitering this stage, he fell at high speed and suffered concussion and deep cuts to his face and scalp.
Whether Pantani can today begin a campaign of guerrilla warfare similar to that which won him the 1998 race remains to be seen but his team, Mercatone Uno, have been racing as if they think he can. Yesterday, as on Saturday and Thursday, they were prominent in chasing down escapes which might have left relative outsiders, such as Elli - and Armstrong's team-mate Tyler Hamilton - highly placed overall if they had not been kept within reach.
Meanwhile, far behind, sprinters and baroudeurs alike will become allies as they fight to finish within the stage's time limit in a mutual, and equally painful, fight for survival.
