The day after his teammates crumbled, Lance Armstrong surrendered. But it was a calculated move designed to make the coming days easier to manage.
Armstrong relinquished the Tour de France leader’s yellow jersey on Sunday’s ninth stage, allowing Team CSC rider Jens Voigt to ride away in pursuit of stage winner Mickael Rasmussen on the 171km route from Gerardmer to Mulhouse in eastern France.
Rasmussen won the first Tour stage win of his career, while Voigt took the overall lead and pulled more than two minutes clear of Armstrong in the overall standings.
”I felt like today [Sunday] might be the day when the jersey would be given away, and it turned out it was,” Armstrong said. ”We don’t need the yellow jersey. We don’t need to keep it in the Alps, we need to have it at the end.
”Let’s see how the race unfolds,” he added. ”The first priority is that the guys feel better and get their confidence back.”
In contrast to Saturday’s eighth stage — where Armstrong’s teammates crumbled up a modest category-two climb — things seemed back to normal on Sunday.
The Discovery Channel squad sat at the front of the pack, taking turns to lead the American up the hardest climb of the Tour so far, a category-one ascent up the famed Ballon d’Alsace.
Jan Ullrich, Alexandre Vinokourov and Andreas Kloeden — all of the T-Mobile team — cruised along just behind Discovery, conserving energy for the Alps, where they will attack Armstrong when the Tour resumes on Tuesday.
Curiously, in the village before the start of the stage, the team buses — the sky-blue of Discovery and the bright pink of T-Mobile — faced each other across a road, offering a taste of challenges ahead.
”We were better than yesterday and that’s good going into the rest day,” Armstrong said, prior to boarding a flight to Grenoble.
His team director, Johan Bruyneel, sounded relieved that further mishaps were avoided.
”We’re back where we have to be,” Bruyneel said. ”They rode well and had control of everything on the climbs and on the flats. It was an important day for us. Nobody understands what happened yesterday [Saturday].”
Rasmussen was delighted at his first win. He beat second-placed Christophe Moreau and Voigt by more than three minutes, and well clear of Armstrong, who finished 28th in the main group, with Ullrich 29th and Vinokourov 35th, all 6:04 behind.
The rest day at Grenoble is only one of two in the 23-day race, but it is illusory. Riders generally spend at least a couple of hours training out on the road. Complete rest is ill advised as it upsets the rhythm accumulated over the past nine days of racing.
Armstrong’s troops will need to be at their best on Tuesday’s first Alpine ascent from Grenoble to Courchevel. It features two category-one climbs, the second of which is an uphill finish to the ski resort of Courchevel — 22,2km at a 6,2% gradient.
Armstrong will rely on his teammates to protect him from a growing field of dangerous opponents — several of whom have yet to make their mark.
Vinokourov and Kloeden have already shown glimpses of what may await, launching repeated attacks on Saturday. But Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner, has been biding his time, slowly churning his big gears and shaking off the lingering effects of a nasty crash the day before the Tour.
Vinokourov is 1:02 behind Armstrong overall; Ullrich is 1:36.
Such distances can disappear in one climb if Armstrong has a bad mountain day — or his team are not there to support him.
Other rivals — such as Armstrong’s former teammate Floyd Landis, Spanish mountain experts Iban Mayo and Joseba Beloki, and Italian Ivan Basso — could also threaten. Armstrong will have to decipher which are the more dangerous riders.
”He has to pick who he wants to follow. You can’t follow 20 guys,” said Frankie Andreu, a teammate of Armstrong’s on the victorious 1999 Tour. ”There’s a lot of guys who are waiting for an opportunity.” — Sapa-AP