As the Tour crossed Brittany yesterday it seemed as if half the population of this cycling heartland had turned out among the granite churches and roadside crosses to welcome Laurent Jalabert, France's most successful cyclist of the last few years.
Jalabert, for five years ranked world number one, is back in the maillot jaune, which he first pulled on hear in Vitre, this fortified gateway to Brittany, five years ago, and very much back in the fold after an 18-month-long cold war with his country.
When Jalabert walked out of the 1998 Tour in disgust at the police raids in search of banned drugs he vowed never to return, and he did not race on his native roads last year.
Time - plus the awareness that, at 31, he will start only two or three more Tours de France at most - has healed the wounds, and his ONCE team's victory in Tuesday's team time-trial has sealed the reconciliation. A decent spell in yellow will turn it into a love affair.
The judges are doing Jalabert no favours though: after the team time-trial they docked him 20 seconds because a team-mate was paced by a team car, and yesterday they considered that a tiny gap had opened in the peloton as it sprinted into the finish.
Jalabert was on the wrong side of the split, so he was timed in 10 seconds after the winner, the German Marcel Wust, and more importantly, Jan Ullrich and Lance Armstrong. Tours can be won and lost by margins such as these.
Wust is more Australian than German in his demeanour after spending most of his winters down under. He speaks seven languages and is what the French call branche - switched on - literally so, as every evening he emails a diary to internet sites, such as cyclingnews.com.
His complaints about mountain climbing figure strongly, but yesterday he crossed the line clad in the polka-dot jersey of best climber, something no sprinter has achieved since 1994.
Wust acquired the jersey through a mix of cheek and cunning: the only climb counting for the competition up to yesterday was a brief timed hill during Saturday's prologue, so he set off on his lightweight road-racing bike, rather than his heavier time-trialling machine, rode steadily to the foot of the hill, then took it flat out.
It earned him four appearances on the podium, so measured purely in terms of gain for pain it was probably the move of the Tour.
Yesterday, however, four hills carried points, and Wust had relinquished the polka-dot jersey to the Italian Roberto Bettini by the time he sped into Vitre.
He was still ecstatic - in several languages - as his only other attempt at the Tour, in 1992, was cut short by injury before the race even reached France and this was his first Tour stage in almost 100 career victories.
Tour de France - Fifth stage (202km, Vannes-Vitre): 1 M Wust (Ger) 4hrs 19mins 05secs, 2 E Zabel (Ger) same time, 3 S Zanini (Ita) st, 4 T Steels (Bel), 5 S Commesso (Ita), 6 R McEwen (Aus), 7 J Koerts (Ned), 8 S O'Grady (Aus), 9 R Vainsteins (Lat), 10 E Magnien (Fra), 11 M Mori (Ita), 12 N Mattan (Bel), 13 G Gwiazdowski (Pol), 14 A Piziks (Lat), 15 D Pieri (Ita) all same time.
Overall: 1 L Jalabert (Fra) 14hrs 28mins 23secs, 2 D Canada (Spa) at 00:12secs, 3 L Armstrong (USA) at 00:16, 4 A Olano (Spa) 00:35, 5 V Ekimov (Rus) 00:43, 6 N Jalabert (Fra) 00:49, 7 I Gutierrez (Spa) 00:49, 8 M Serrano (Spa) 00:52, 9 P Luttenberger (Aut) 00:53, 10 MA Pena (Spa) 00:54, 11 T Hamilton (USA) 00:55, 12 J Ullrich (Ger) 00:59, 13 K Livingston (USA) 01:18, 14 J Voigt (Ger) 01:20, 15 G Hincapie (USA) 01:25.
