Tour de Lance by Bill Strickland

Author:Bill Strickland [Strickland, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO011000, SPO034000, SPO000000
ISBN: 9781742373072
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2010-05-31T14:00:00+00:00

TOUR DE FRANCE, STAGE 5

Le Cap d’Agde–Perpignan, 196.5 km

JULY 8, 2009

Everyone knows the early breakaway is going to be allowed to run for a while when behind the six escaped riders much of the peloton pulls to the side of the road for a mass arrêt pipi—a pee stop. Though the course heads inland from the coast just briefly before turning south to parallel the Mediterranean, the winds today are not blowing in from the water but southward from the Pyrenees mountains. The pack will have a tailwind most of the day. About 30 kilometers from the end, where the route makes a U-turn toward the finish town of Perpignan, the wind suddenly will be in their faces. Most of the riders think Cancellara is going to ask Saxo to try to split the peloton there the way Columbia did in Stage 3. But that’s about four hours away, and the 80-degree sun feels good on their muscles, and many of them are tired or banged up from the team time trial the day before, so the pack is happy enough to allow the breakaway some open road.

Besides, one of the six in the break is Thomas Voeckler, a Frenchman riding for Bbox. He’s popular with the pack, and Bbox was one of the previous day’s bad-luck teams, so there’s a general though unvoiced feeling that Voeckler is worthy of some time out front, some publicity for his sponsor, some heroics in front of his countrymen. Five years ago to the day, a largely unknown, twenty-five-year-old Voeckler snuck into an unlikely break that ended up finishing 12 minutes ahead of the pack, and he took the yellow jersey with a huge 9:35 lead over Armstrong. The gap was larger than Bruyneel and Armstrong had hoped to grant, but their strategy was intact: the responsibility of protecting the jersey across the next several flat stages would fall on Voeckler’s team, allowing U.S. Postal Service to conserve its energy until the race reached the crucial stages in the Pyrenees mountains, where Armstrong figured to get into yellow for good. But Voeckler mounted one of the most improbable jersey defenses of the modern age, holding on to his lead for ten days. With his face contorted and his body shivering, Voeckler rode in a way nobody—not even himself—ever would have guessed he could, and on the first day in the Pyrenees, on the massive Col de Tourmalet, he preserved half of his lead over Armstrong. On the second day, he saved the jersey by 22 seconds, repeatedly climbing back into contention after getting dropped on Plateau de Beille. “I did it on guts alone,” Voeckler said. He kept the jersey through the flat stages that followed as a transition to the Alps, then lost it to Armstrong on the first day of that round of climbing. Possessing the yellow jersey and riding like two men was one thing, but riding like Armstrong in the third week of a Tour was another. But even the legend had been impressed by the suffering Voeckler was able to endure.

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