Bastille Day Stage Win To France
Reaping Bastille Day glory, Frenchman Richard Virenque won the first mountain stage of this Tour de France on Wednesday with a courageous signature solo ride.
The brave escape by the darling of French cycling fans took Virenque a step closer to his goal for this Tour: to become the first seven-time winner of the pink-spotted jersey as best climber.
The 147-mile stage, the Tour's longest, also saw the first man-to-man jousting between five-time champion Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich, his main rival aiming to thwart the Texan's drive for a record sixth Tour crown.
Honors were even. They both finished the stage in the same time, 5 minutes and 19 seconds behind Virenque's mark of six hours and 24 seconds.
But 32-year-old Armstrong appeared to catch other challengers off-guard by finishing with a sprint. American Tyler Hamilton and Spain's Roberto Heras both dropped seven seconds to the Texan and to Ullrich.
Armstrong finished sixth in the stage, just behind French champion Thomas Voeckler, who retained the overall Tour lead, capping a day of national pride. Ullrich placed 15th.
Armstrong is sixth overall, still 9 minutes, 35 seconds behind Voeckler. Armstrong extended his lead over Hamilton to 43 seconds and over Heras, his former teammate, to 1 minute, 52 seconds.
In a teaser of their expected battles to come in the harder Pyrenees and Alps, Armstrong and Ullrich led the main pack up the hardest of nine climbs on Wednesday — a 3.5-mile ascent of Le Puy Mary, in the Massif Central region of central France. The climb, the Tour's hardest so far, grew steeper as it went up and was where Virenque first surged alone into the lead.
But Johan Bruyneel, sports manager of Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team, said it was still too early in the three-week race to tell whether the Texan is stronger than his challengers.
Armstrong "looked good and sounded good on the radio," Bruyneel said. "It was a hard climb ... but still very far from the finish of the race, so we can't really know now who is good and bad."
The stage win was Virenque's seventh in a long career marked both by performances bursting with panache and the lows of a doping scandal in 1998. His last stage win was to Morzine in the Alps in 2003 — also after a brave solo effort ahead of the chasing pack.
Cheered on by hundreds of thousands of fans relishing the Bastille Day holiday, Virenque became the 14th Frenchman since World War II to win on France's national day and the first since Laurent Jalabert in 2001.
A teary Virenque dedicated his win to a friend who died two days earlier and his grandmother who died in June. He said their memory drove him on through the pain of riding alone at the end.
"It's fabulous, I was at the end of my strength," he said. "I had cramps everywhere."
The Morocco-born Virenque rode at the head of the race, out in front of the following pack, for more than 125 miles.
Accompanied much of the way by Axel Merckx, the son of five-time Tour champion Eddy Merckx, they built up a lead of more than 10 minutes. But Virenque dropped the Belgian rider on the 5,897-foot-high Le Puy Mary.
Virenque rode alone over the last 40 miles to the finish in Saint-Flour, thrusting his arms into the air as he crossed the line and pointing to the sky.
At 34, Virenque is approaching the end of a career that could see him hailed at the Tour's best-ever climber if he again wins the spotted jersey at the finish in Paris on July 25. He currently is tied with Spanish rider Federico Bahamontes and Belgian Lucien Van Impe with six mountain titles.
Virenque was a member of the Festina team that was ejected from the 1998 Tour after customs officers found a large stash of banned drugs in a team car.
In a trial that followed, Virenque caused a furor with testimony on systematic drug abuse within his team and cycling in general.
His admission of doping led to a seven-month ban that kept him out of the 2001 Tour. At the time, he said he felt his career was over.
By John Leicester