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| Wednesday, July 3 Updated: July 4, 10:06 AM ET Out-of-this-world Armstrong seeks fourth straight win By Paula Parrish Scripps Howard News Service |
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Someday, Lance Armstrong will phone home. He will return to whatever planet he's from, leaving us with a cycling legacy that no ordinary Homo sapiens of Darwinian evolution possibly could have accomplished. In the macho parlance of the Tour de France, it's an honor -- or a curse -- to be called an "alien'' or an "extraterrestrial'' by other top riders. But it's used only when referring to the best of the best. Miguel Indurain was called an extraterrestrial by more than one of the guys he blew away on his way to winning the Tour de France a record five consecutive years. "Lance is from another planet,'' said Jonathan Vaughters of Denver, a top support rider for Credit Agricole, one of six French teams in the 89th Tour de France, which starts Saturday. Vaughters is one of Armstrong's former teammates, with the U.S. national team (1989) and the U.S. Postal Service team (1998-1999). "When I first met Lance, he wasn't an efficient rider, he was just an incredibly strong rider,'' said Vaughters, 29. "Now he's both. He is on a totally different level. It's a different Tour he is riding from the rest of us.'' It's time once again for the Tour de Lance ... er, the Tour de France, and Armstrong is once again "l'homme'' (the man), seeking his fourth consecutive title and trying to become one of only five men to win the world's most grueling race at least four times. Though Armstrong is healthy and strong -- and close to the pivotal five-year-free mark that all cancer survivors celebrate -- his coach, Chris Carmichael of Carmichael Training Systems in Colorado Springs, is biting his nails a bit. Armstrong's path to another title looks easier than ever before, mostly because his top competitors have fallen out of the race because of injury or drug-related problems:
"I won't say I'm nervous, but I would categorize it as there are a few more unknowns with this year's Tour with some of the favorites out,'' Carmichael said. "It's a little bit of an unknown who could step out as major challengers.'' Armstrong himself is looking to be on top of his game, with victories the past few weeks in both the Midi Libre and Dauphine Libere, the two most important warm-up races leading to the Tour de France. This year's Tour is the shortest in recent history. Tour director Jean-Marie LeBlanc called the course "short and human,'' with no more than three stages in excess of 200 kilometers. The mountain stages are where Armstrong, a strong climber, takes over the race, but this year, the tough mountain stages are at the end -- meaning Armstrong's rivals might try to build a huge -- and perhaps insurmountable -- lead in the early stages. But Carmichael said he doesn't believe race organizers had stopping Armstrong in mind when they set the course. "I think, at this stage, that probably the only thing that could keep Lance from winning is a crisis situation out there,'' Carmichael said, "meaning something that he experiences out there, a crash, an illness, maybe there's a break(away) in one of those early stages.'' Or maybe he's abducted ... by aliens? Paula Parrish is a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. |
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