Armstrong proves point in Ullrich's backyard

Lance Armstrong's tart comment on this stage, running out of Germany into France through what amounts to Jan Ullrich's backyard, was that the Tour organisers would never be able to do him the favour of running a potentially decisive leg near his home town of Austin, Texas.

However, the American had the Tour virtually won before he rolled down the start ramp in Fribourg, with only honour at stake along the largely flat roads which staged a vast Ullrich-fest.

The Blue Danube was playing at the start and smoke from a thousand bratwurst barbecues wafted across the sweetcorn fields, swamped in a sea of flags and balloons in the pink of the German's Deutsche Telekom team.

A few stars and stripes aside, the support was largely for Ullrich; but the force was with Armstrong, as it has been since he took the yellow jersey on the Hautacam climb in the Pyrenees 12 days ago.

As an incentive, the Texan knew that aspersions might be cast if he won this Tour without taking a stage. If not his last chance, yesterday was certainly his best and he took it in the same decisive manner that won him all three stages against the watch last year.

Starting three minutes behind Ullrich, Armstrong gave the impression he was merely keeping tabs on the German, gaining gradually and ceding a little ground at the end when the job was done to finish 25 seconds ahead. Not a spectacular margin, but behind the two the gaps were vast, with only the Frenchman Christophe Moreau finishing within three minutes.

"I really wanted this stage," he said. "The Tour would not have been complete if I had not won a stage, and that added some pressure."

The day's other battle, the four-way contest for third behind Armstrong and Ullrich, did not go quite as expected, with the Basque climber Joseba Beloki holding off Moreau, his Festina team-mate, by a mere 30 seconds to emulate his fellow countryman and fellow mountain man, Fernando Escartin, in third place in his first Tour.

The Festina jersey has not been seen on the podium of the Tour since 1997, before the drug seizures gave the team a different kind of notoriety. Beloki arrived in the team this year as part of a new wave of riders hired by new management after the clearout that followed the scandals of 1998. Moreau is the last survivor of the old guard, thrown off the 1998 race and banned for six months last year, with a steroid positive test on his curriculum vitae to boot.

Two years on, the Tour continues to offer mixed messages, although there are encouraging signs of change. "There are definitely indications that a certain number of riders have broken with the habits of the past," says Gerard Guillaume, the doctor of the French team La Francaise des Jeux. "You just have to look at the rankings and the way certain teams are riding. But others still raise the same questions."

Teams are showing less willingness to ride, machine-like, at the front of the bunch for an entire stage to mould the racing to their will. Those that have attempted to control the racing have paid the price in pure fatigue, which might not have happened four or five years ago.

Today the riders face an over-long but flat run due west across the Haute-Saone, Haute-Marne and Aube provinces, after which the Orient Express will whisk them into Paris where nine cancer survivors will greet Armstrong, a timely reminder that the Texan has overcome far more than distance, mountains and his fellow racers to win his two Tours.