Lance Armstrong captured the yellow jersey of the Tour de France's leader in dramatic fashion Tuesday, when the rival who was wearing it crashed minutes before the end of a long team time trial and finished nearly a minute and a half behind his teammates.
When the rider in yellow, Dave Zabriskie, inexplicably went down hard on his left side and slid with his bicycle into a crowd barrier, his CSC team momentarily lost its concentration. That cost the team what had appeared to be a victory, since it was then leading Armstrong's Discovery Channel team by two seconds, a margin that turned into a two-second defeat.
"The team time trial is so hard at the end that everybody's on the edge -- at the limit," Armstrong said after the 67.5km race against the clock. He noted that Zabriskie fell in a section with varying winds, large crowds and many turns.
PHOTO: EPA
"He's a great young rider," Armstrong, the six-time Tour champion, said. "I suspect he'll be in yellow again in the future."
Zabriskie, a 26-year-old American who won the jersey in the opening stage on Saturday, was not seriously hurt, race doctors reported. They said he had cuts and bruises along his left side, where his shorts and jersey were ripped and smeared with road oil.
Although French television repeated images of the crash throughout the late afternoon, it remained unclear what had happened. Zabriskie, who is known for nervousness when he rides in the pack because of a bad crash in a race in California last year, was not available for comment.
PHOTO: EPA
Discovery Channel was timed in 1 hour 10 minutes 39 seconds on the breezy trek from Tours to Blois, the fourth of 21 daily stages. CSC, which led at every checkpoint until the finish, was two seconds back, with T-Mobile third, 35 seconds behind, Liberty Seguros fourth, 53 seconds behind, and Phonak fifth, 1:31 behind.
That translated into time losses of 20, 30, 40 and 50 seconds for the runners-up to the American team. Discovery Channel's average speed of 57.3km an hour easily exceeded the team time trial record of 54.9kph set by Gewiss in 1995, although comparisons are invalid because the courses are different and bicycles and roads have improved.
Armstrong, who started the day two seconds back in second place, would have taken the yellow jersey even if Zabriskie had not fallen, as long as Discovery Channel won. Armstrong, 33, is seeking his seventh consecutive Tour de France championship, and has pledged to retire after the Tour concludes in Paris on July 21, regardless of the outcome.
PHOTO: EPA
An American teammate, George Hincapie, is now in second place, 55 seconds behind his leader. Jens Voigt, a German with CSC, is third, 1:04 behind, with Bobby Julich, another American with CSC, in fourth place, 1:07 behind. Zabriskie fell to ninth place, 1:26 behind.
"It's always nice to win this event and show the team is strong and balanced," Armstrong said. This was his team's third successive victory in a Tour team time trial.
As for whether the team will defend the yellow jersey by riding after enemy breakaways and trying to control stage outcomes, Armstrong was uncertain.
"We're going to think about it," he said, noting that the Tour will reach the first mountains on July 12 and that he did not want his team to be wearied before then.
Since all nine Discovery Channel riders finished in the same time, five of them rank in the top eight of the 189 men in the Tour.
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