Lance Wins Tour de France
Lance Armstrong won his fourth straight Tour de France title on Sunday, claiming one of his biggest and smoothest victories to date in the grueling three-week event.
The Texan crossed the finish line on the Champs-Elysees in the bright yellow leader's jersey he has worn since taking control of the race 10 days ago. He finished with a whopping lead of more than 7 minutes.
The victory put the 30-year-old cancer survivor one win short of equaling the event record of five titles.
Armstrong was lost in the main pack as riders completed the 20th stage from Melun, outside Paris, to the tree-lined Champs-Elysees, where thousands of fans gathered, many of them waving American flags.
His overall lead after the final stage stood at 7 minutes, 17 seconds.
It was Armstrong's second biggest winning margin since first taking the Tour in 1999 with a 7:37 advantage of Alex Zuelle of Switzerland.
Spain's Joseba Beloki was second overall and Raimondas Rumsas of Lithuania third.
Armstrong's tranquil ride to the finish mirrored the rest of his title campaign, in which neither rivals nor the demanding 3,277.5-kilometer (2,032.05-mile) course seemed to test the Austin native.
He seized the race lead in the first mountain leg at La Mongie in the Pyrenees, and nearly doubled it by sprinting up a grueling climb to the Plateau de Beille in the next day's 12th stage.
On the formidable Mont Ventoux in the southern Provence region, he placed third but took an almost unbridgeable lead of 4:21 by finishing nearly 2 minutes in front of his top rival, Spain's Joseba Beloki.
"Armstrong has shown he has the blood of champions flowing through his veins," the director of Beloki's Once team, Manolo Saiz, said after the Ventoux. "He is much stronger than us, we see it day after day."
It was Armstrong's fifth unsuccessful attempt at winning on the Ventoux, but what mattered was stretching his race lead, rather than taking spectacular — and tiring — stage victories.
"The smart thing to do is to ride conservative now," the U.S. Postal Service rider said as he headed to the Alps. "This is not a race to win by as many seconds or minutes as possible, it's a race just to win. So there's no need to be aggressive."
That didn't stop him adding 45 seconds in the last three mountain stages and winning a blistering final time trial that extended his advantage by more than 2 minutes.
"I can remember in 1999 being so nervous every day and worried that I would lose the race in an instant," Armstrong said Saturday. "I don't have those fears any more."