Armstrong perfectly on cue

Lance Armstrong's great friend Robin Williams was in a front seat in the Texan's US Postal Service team car as Armstrong scattered Jan Ullrich and the rest of the Tour de France field to the four winds here yesterday and afterwards, in pidgin French, the actor gave as lucid an analysis as anyone here can manage of the American's performance.

"Six and a half hours in the mountains, then like a motorbike, voom. . ." he jabbered, making a gesture of an aeroplane taking off. The scenario, however, was not so much Mrs Doubtfire as Groundhog Day.

For the third year running, the first major mountain stage of the Tour has belonged to the Texan, as it did at Sestriere on the other side of the Alps in 1999, and at the Hautacam ski station in the Pyrenees last year.

The weather was dry but that was about the only difference. As on the previous two occasions Armstrong put in a sudden burst of pace at the foot of the climb, looked at the opposition - Alex Zulle in 1999, Marco Pantani last year, Ullrich yesterday - saw signs of weakness and accelerated again before taking flight alone.

From a distance it looks clinical, but the inner energy which Armstrong produces once opportunity beckons is nothing short of savage. On yesterday's evidence, Williams has been teaching the Texan how to act. Armstrong was rarely anywhere near the front of the leading group on either of the day's two passes, the 6,000-foot Col de la Madeleine, and the Col du Glandon, which is slightly lower, but rears up like a wall for its final few kilometres.

This raised hopes that the double Tour winner might be having an off day, and Ullrich duly ordered his Deutsche Telekom team-mates to set the tempo.

Afterwards, Armstrong admitted he had been "playing poker a little". He explained: "In cycling, everyone's watching - the [team]directors have television in their cars, and you can hear the television camera motorbikes come alongside to look at you. Sometimes you have to play that game a little bit."

And when Armstrong made his effort at the foot of the Alpe following a surge of speed from his Spanish team-mate Jose-Luis Rubiera, Ullrich had the look of a man who could not believe what he was seeing.

Traditionally, the 11.25 miles of numbered hairpins leading to this resort are annexed for the day by the Dutch, winners here several times in the 1970s and 1980s, but a spent force since 1989.

They still come en masse, wearing orange dungarees and in flatable plastic crowns and setting up loudspeakers blaring out oompah music in a sea of orange streamers, but other nations have joined them, reflecting the emergence of a new, more international audience for the Tour.

Yesterday, there were Danes in viking helmets and Americans by the score, waving the stars and stripes as they ran alongside Armstrong, and, at one point he found himself between two fans dressed up as quarterbacks, complete with helmets and football. But the Germans were most striking. There were signs from village after village proclaiming their loyalty to Ullrich, and the pink of his Telekom team was everywhere.

"It's a mystical stage," said Armstrong, the first defending Tour winner to triumph here since Bernard Hinault in 1985. He may have meant mythical as there was no mystery about yesterday's result. The first four at the top of the Alpe were the first four in Paris last year - Armstrong, Ullrich, Joseba Beloki and Christophe Moreau. There is, however, a peculiar look to the overall pecking order, where three of Sunday's escapees still have a temporary hold thanks to the 35 minutes they gained into Pontarlier.

Spectacular as it was, Armstrong's victory could not wipe out all their gains, and Francois Simon of the Bonjour team now holds the yellow jersey, but he can be expected to bid it au revoir in the near future, perhaps not today, but certainly in the Pyrenees.

Simon's is the kind of story France loves. His brothers Pascal, Regis and Jerome all won stages in the Tour, and it was on a stage finishing here 18 years ago that Pascal became one of the few riders to quit while in yellow.

Simon has almost 12 minutes in hand on the Kazakh Andrei Kivilev of David Millar's Cofidis team, another member of the great escape, and a better climber. Stuart O'Grady still lies third, but the true story begins with Armstrong, now lying fourth, who leads Beloki, Moreau and Ullrich by between 1 minute 45 seconds and 2 min 44 sec.

Elsewhere, three officials of former Dutch cycling team TVM, were given suspended prison sentences and fined by a French court yesterday after being found guilty of instigating systematic drug abuse amongst the cyclists.

The verdict is a fresh blow to the image of the sport, which has been rocked by a number of drugs scandals over the past three years.