It’s a Matter of Seconds for Armstrong

Bolting off the launch ramp to defend his title as champion in the Tour de France, American Lance Armstrong was edged out in the first stage of this year’s race Saturday by a Briton making his very first appearance in the Tour.

David Millar, 23, beat the older Texan by two seconds in a 10 1/4-mile race against the clock through wheat fields, tile-roofed country villages and the grounds of the Futuroscope theme park north of Poitiers.

“It was a race that was made for me,” said Millar, who covered his eyes and wept with disbelief and joy after he saw Armstrong cross the finish line with the slower time. “In England, it’s all we race--10-mile time trials.”

The event was only the brief curtain-raiser to the most challenging ordeal in professional cycling: Twenty more days of racing, and 2,260 miles of road, lie ahead, some of it over the lofty peaks of the Pyrenees and the French and Swiss Alps. But there is no question that this year’s Tour is more arduous than the course on which Armstrong triumphed in 1999, and the competition much stiffer.

Last year, there were no previous Tour winners in the field. This year, there are three: Armstrong, who leads the team sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service; Jan Ullrich of Germany/Deutsche Telecom; and Marco Pantani of Italy/Mercatone Uno.

“I’m coming with the ambition to win, but I can’t guarantee that,” Armstrong, 28, said with his habitual frankness as the clock ticked down for the Tour’s inaugural stage here. “The race will perhaps be totally open when we hit the mountains. So everybody’s a threat.”

Last year’s victor, though, is the clear favorite and the man to beat, and Saturday’s slim margin of defeat won’t change that. In contemporary cycling, Armstrong is “Le Boss,” one French sports magazine headlined last week.

On Saturday, he was the last of 177 cyclists to start the time trial, displaying the number “1” on his back, his privilege as final holder of the winner’s yellow jersey last year.

A lot lies ahead before this Tour, the 87th, cruises to a finish in Paris on July 23. Lean, weather-beaten and coolly confident, Armstrong says that his physical condition has never been better and that he and the other riders of U.S. Postal have never trained harder.

In 1999, Armstrong, who made a remarkable recovery from cancer, took the Tour’s four-mile Prologue by seven seconds with a masterful display of speed and technical skill. On the way to winning the race overall, he triumphed in all of the time trials, putting himself in a select club with five-time Tour victors Eddie Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain.

Even Millar, who will wear the leader’s yellow jersey when the Tour resumes today, volunteered that he would have finished with a poorer time than Armstrong if the course had been different.

“To be fair, had it been a longer time trial or harder, Lance would have beaten me,” acknowledged Millar, son of a Royal Air Force officer, who was born on the Mediterranean island of Malta and raised in Hong Kong.

Of other top contenders, Ullrich finished 14 seconds behind Millar’s 19 minutes 3 seconds, in fourth place. Pantani, a climbing specialist not in his element on flatlands like most of the landscape around Poitiers, was a full 2:16 behind the leader, in 136th place.

Laurent Jalabert, a Frenchman who has never won the Tour, was in third, 13 seconds behind Millar, who rides for Cofidis of France.

Asked by reporters outside the U.S. Postal van what had happened, Armstrong, who was inaugurating a new bike made of carbon fiber with a 2.44-pound frame designed for time trials, said he started too fast and flamed out.

“But I can be happy that I’m in front of the other favorites, that I have gained some time on them,” he said.

Today, the Tour de France goes on the road, for a 194-kilometer (120-mile) dash from Futuroscope to Loudun, a small town noted for its melons. This year’s route includes 51 hills and mountains, including seven hors categorie--right off the scale used to rank degrees of difficulty. On July 15, for the first time in more than half a century, the riders will have to scale three 6,600-foot Alpine summits in a single day.

“There’s no doubt it’s harder [than in 1999],” Armstrong said. “There’s more climbing, especially concentrated in the second half of the race, in the Alps. Having been there and ridden the courses, I can tell you and assure you they are much more demanding than they were last year.”

On Tuesday, Armstrong and the rest of the Postal squad will have to take part in a revived Tour event they’ve never performed in competition: a 70-kilometer (43.5-mile) team time trial, when the entire team will race in a pack from Nantes to Saint Nazaire. On that day, Armstrong’s personal performance won’t count--the entire squad is awarded the time of its fifth-fastest rider.

Armstrong, though, said he has fewer jitters about the Tour than last year and is “comfortable” with his own fitness and that of his teammates. To boost his condition to a “new level,” he said, he trained hard for 10 days before the Tour near the French Riviera city of Nice, where he lives with his wife and young son.

“I don’t want to lose because of bad luck,” Armstrong said. “But if I’m beaten fair and square, at least they’ll know that I did my best and that I prepared as hard as I could, and I wasn’t the strongest. I consider that normally the strongest person always wins the Tour de France. I’ll do my best, and hopefully I will be happy with that.”

*

After a surprise drug test of all 180 entrants Saturday--and in what was believed to be a first for the Tour--three riders were barred from starting because suspiciously high red-cell levels had been recorded in their blood. The racers disqualified were Sergei Ivanov of Russia, one of the big guns of the Farm Frites team of the Netherlands; Rossano Brasi of Italy/Polti; and Andrej Hauptman of Slovenia/Vini Caldirola-Sidermec.

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Tour de France at a Glance

Saturday’s opening leg of the 87th Tour de France:

* STAGE: A 10.3-mile individual time trial around the Futuroscope theme park in western France.

* STAGE WINNER: Britain’s David Millar in 19 minutes 3 seconds.

* HOW OTHERS FARED: Defending champion Lance Armstrong finished in second place, two seconds behind Millar. Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner, was fourth, 14 seconds back. Alex Zulle, last year’s runner-up, finished sixth, 20 seconds behind Millar. Marco Pantani, champion two years ago, was a distant 136th and already has more than two minutes to make up.

* QUOTE OF THE DAY: “To beat someone like Lance surprised me greatly. I didn’t want to believe it until I saw him crossing the line. . . . I’m going to sleep in the yellow jersey tonight.” -- David Millar

* NEXT STAGE: Road racing begins today with a 120-mile trek from Futuroscope to Loudun as the Tour begins its move toward northwestern France.