The war on wheels - 22 days 2000 miles

While we are sitting in our houses, or wandering around the streets, there are people out there at war. They have fought each other and the elements for the last couple of days, here are fights, blood, no deaths yet, tactics galore, team battles, sabotage, and pure gutsy endurance.

Yeah, the Tour De france is on again, the sport that transends sports.

Get into it,

Armstrong will start his drive for the front on wednesday, at the moment he has been conserving energy in the pack, and avoiding the accidents, bracketed by his teammates who are his protectors.

www.sfgate.com.../news/archive/2003/07/08/sports1635EDT0340.DTL

His bid for a fifth straight Tour de France title begins in earnest Wednesday in team time trials. By day's end, a member of Armstrong's team could be wearing the leader's yellow jersey.

That would also put Armstrong in excellent position before cycling's showcase race heads into the arduous climbs up the Alps on Saturday.

www.bicycling.com...


Armstrong in the blue, just biding his time..


[Edited on 9-7-2003 by Netchicken]

Kraftwerk:

current version of 'Tour De France' live
great new rhythms
nice variations
nice footage

I Thought this was a great article on the endurance of the riders, riding with a broken collarbone, got to be excrucuating.

www.nytimes.com...

Tyler Hamilton, a spindly chap from Marblehead, Mass., however, is showing his own masochistic colleagues a new level of endurance: he is cycling with a broken right collarbone.

Hamilton, who broke the bone in a nasty spill at the end of Sunday's stage, has now completed two full stages with tape holding his right shoulder together. He is currently 18 seconds behind the leader, but the Tour de France always has new and fascinating levels of pain to inflict.

Today, Hamilton will attempt to ride in the team time trial, which involves hunching even further over the handlebars to keep up with your teammates on a nice spin through the countryside of the Champagne region.

As of last night, Hamilton had not lowered his shoulders into the team-trial position.

"Not yet," he said.

He would save that exquisite form of torture for this morning before the trial. Yesterday, he was simply happy to have completed 167.5 kilometers (104 miles) through rolling countryside.

Cyclists endure pain during stinging rainstorms high in the mountains. They suffer in the roasting heat in the valleys. They cycle with cuts and bruises from crashes. Then there is the normal pain from cycling endlessly for three weeks. But Hamilton has the X-rays to prove he is one tough cyclist.

"What he's doing is unbelievable," said Michael Blaudzhun of Denmark, Hamilton's teammate on the CSC team. "I cannot imagine doing that."

What the Mantles and the Reeds would say is that their teammates depended on them. This is also true of cyclists. Hamilton was hired away from being one of Lance Armstrong's outriders on the United States Postal Service team so he could be the leader of Team CSC, which is based in Denmark.

Normally, Hamilton would be expected to lead his team in the time trials today. Racing in staggered starts, each team sends out nine cyclists in unison. Hamilton does not know if he will be able to help. If he is not strong, the other cyclists may have to leave him behind. If he is strong, he pushes all of them.

"If I can help tomorrow, I can save the team," he said yesterday.

Giving a mass interview outside the team van, with strong white tape extending to the bottom of his neck, Hamilton seemed hollow-eyed and gaunt, with the 1,000-mile stare cyclists usually have at the end of the Tour. He had good cause. The legal drugs were wearing off.

"We had to help him; I am a medical doctor," Joost DeMaeseneer, a Belgian who is the team physician for CSC, said. "We try to control the painkiller, so we give it to him on the bus a few minutes before the stage."

After nearly 210 minutes on the bicycle, Hamilton felt the pain intrude. It was, after all, only 48 hours since the crash.

"The legs are good," he said. "The thighs are in rough shape after the crash. My whole body has aches and pains. But every day is better than before. I try to be patient and it will come around."

This is not a normal way to recover from a broken bone, of course. The doctors say he can do himself no harm. Last year, Hamilton raced with a broken left shoulder and was in such pain that he ground down 11 of his teeth so badly that he needed extensive dental work.

Yesterday, he tried to keep from grinding his teeth.

"I sang some songs to myself," he said, but did not give any examples.

Hamilton drew a blank when asked about American team athletes who had inspired him by playing with pain. But he is a close friend of Armstrong, who has won four straight Tours since recovering from cancer.

Yesterday, Armstrong encouraged him when they met near the starting line. "He'd do the same thing," Hamilton said.

Hamilton took up cycling after being injured skiing on Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire. He knows he is paid to ride up the near the front of the pack. And he is realistic enough to know that these two stages with the broken collarbone are nothing. The torture does not truly begin until the Alps this weekend.

"If I hit the mountains and I'm not a factor, that's when we'll have to ask the question," he said. "It just depends. I won't get back to 100 percent. I just want to stay on the course."