Armstrong Retains Grip on Lead

Lance Armstrong rolled into Germany’s Black Forest on Thursday still the confident king of the Tour de France, even though a gaggle of daredevil sprinters led by a cocksure Italian stole the show.

Salvatore Commesso of Italy’s Saeco team won the 18th stage in 6 hours 8 minutes 15 seconds with a gutsy performance alongside four fellow sprinters, who dashed away from the rest of the pack as soon as the 153-mile race cleared the Swiss lakeside town of Lausanne en route for Freiburg.

The Italian arrived in the German university town more than 15 minutes ahead of Armstrong and other top-ranked riders.

Armstrong was officially credited with 34th place as he finished alongside scores of other riders and retained his overall lead of 5:37 over Vinokourov’s Deutsche Telekom teammate Jan Ullrich, who finished 42nd.

Commesso and Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan battled it out slyly over the home stretch before Commesso prevailed by barely a wheel length.

Armstrong’s trouble-free performance left him only three stages to go before this weekend’s expected second coronation on the Paris finish line.

But at a postrace news conference, Armstrong slapped aside suggestions the Tour was his.

“Are you serious?” he asked, tacking on an uncomfortably long pause before adding: “The race is not over but--next question.”

And he suggested race organizers were wrong to put the riders through such a long, comparatively unchallenging route so near the end of the competition.

“I don’t think it’s good for the drama of the race, or it’s good for the aggression of the race, to have stages of 250 kilometers,” he said, noting that with Thursday’s racers “going in one direction with a head wind almost the whole way, you’re almost never going to see a really dramatic race in those conditions.”

Soon after the race left Lausanne, a quintet of sprinters broke free from the pack and never looked back.

Averaging 28 mph through the first third of the race, the quintet--Commesso, Vinokourov, Jacky Durand and Jean-Cyril Robin of France, and Jens Voight of Germany--sped ahead of the pack by 27 minutes, by far the biggest such gap in this year’s competition.

Also Thursday, the International Cycling Federation did a fourth round of blood tests, this time on 29 riders from six teams: Telekom, Mapei, Vini Caldirola, Festina, Rabobank and Saeco.

All the tests came back negative for unusual red corpuscle levels and showed no obvious signs of riders using erythropoietin, or EPO, a synthetic hormone that stimulates the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.

Today, Armstrong will face his last real challenge when Ullrich tries to pick up time in an individual time trial from Freibourg to the nearby French town of Mulhouse.

Since time trials involve each rider going as fast as possible on his own, Armstrong won’t have the luxury of sticking nearby Ullrich, the 1997 Tour champ.

But even Ullrich has discounted his chances for the rest of the race.

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Tour de France Glance

A look at the 18th stage:

* STAGE: A mostly downhill 153-mile route from Lausanne, Switzerland, north to the German university town of Freiburg.

* STAGE WINNER: Salvatore Commesso of Italy in 6 hours 8 minutes 15 seconds.

* HOW OTHERS FARED: Commesso prevented Alexandre Vinokourov, a Kazakh racing for Germany’s Deutsche Telekom team, from winning a stage victory for the home crowd. Jacky Durand of France finished third, 1:05 back. Defending champion Lance Armstrong and his closest challenger, Germany’s Jan Ullrich, finished with the bulk of the field more than 15 minutes back, Armstrong in 34th place, Ullrich 42nd.

* QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I would have liked to be second before the final sprint, but Vinokourov was too intelligent to take the bait, so I just had to attack first.”--Commesso, explaining his tactics on the home stretch.

* NEXT STAGE: Today’s 36.5-mile individual time trial from Freiburg to the French town of Mulhouse.