2004 Tour de France Preview

Following the arduous 2003 Tour de France, it was clear Lance Armstrong’s chief rivals would return even stronger in 2004. They had tasted blood in battle and now saw Lance as vulnerable. We knew it would bolster their confidence that they could finally beat him in 2004, and they would focus even more intently on training and preparation. Back in Armstrong’s camp, it didn’t take long to decide how to approach the rising threat: Don’t give them an inch, don’t let them breathe.

Even though the toughest stages are lumped together in the final 10 days of racing, Lance and his team are prepared to make the 2004 Tour de France hard on everyone from the very beginning. With a field so rich in real-deal contenders for the yellow jersey, time gaps are more likely to open by a fistful of seconds at a time, not by minutes through one peloton-shattering attack.

Seconds count at the Tour de France, and that means chasing them at every opportunity. The Prologue, for instance, represents just .09% of the Tour’s total distance. The winning time will probably be somewhere around seven minutes, whereas the winning time for the whole Tour may be somewhere between 80 and 90 hours. Such a short event could seem insignificant. The course is technical, with two nearly dead-stop turns and some cobblestones, which means there are risks associated with going all out to win. Going a little slower would be safer, and it’s not like you could lose that much time in 6.1 kilometers, right?

Wrong. If Lance had taken it easy in last year’s prologue and finished just 15 seconds slower, Jan Ullrich would have taken the yellow jersey from him on Stage 13. You can’t afford to give an inch in the Tour de France because you don’t know if seconds you give away today will be the very ones that cost you the leader’s jersey a few weeks from now.

More than racing to avoid losing time to rivals, Lance has to be prepared to take time from them whenever the opportunity strikes. There are sections of cobblestones, tricky finishes, crosswinds and other situations that could split the field. At the finish, all you need is a two-bike-length gap between riders and the groups in front of and behind the split record separate finish times. Winning a stage gives you a full 12 bonus seconds, and you get six for intermediate sprints. Overall contenders won’t mix it up with the sprinters in the first week, but there are two intermediate sprints each day in the mountain stages if things get really tight.

The more aggressively you take the race to your rivals, the more you reduce the number of offensive options they have to use against you. Rather than wait for one or two decisive moments, the wiser plan this year calls for applying constant pressure, like a full court press in basketball. You’re in your opponents’ faces everywhere they turn, frustrating their attempts to move the ball. You don’t give them an inch, you don’t let them take an easy breath, and when they get flustered and make a mistake, you snag the ball and sprint down the court for a two-handed, backboard-shattering slam-dunk. It’s still only worth two points, but like two seconds, it’s sometimes all you need.