"Smile! You are in the Loire-Atlantique region," read a vast banner strung between the towers of the 300-ft high Saint Nazaire suspension bridge, the main obstacle during yesterday's otherwise pancake-flat 70km team time trial, in which the young Briton, David Millar, surrendered his yellow jersey to France's Laurent Jalabert, whose ONCE ran out winners from Lance Armstrong's US Postal Service.
To the Tour riders, however, the banner was perhaps a slogan too far. Their legs were heavy with 59km of intense effort when they arrived at its exposed, one-in-10 slope with the decidedly troubled waters of the Loire far below whipped into innumerable tiny wavelets by half a gale blowing off the Atlantique.
In these conditions, holding a bike upright while trying to get shelter from a team-mate and maintain speed is a nightmare: "Like trying to hold an airplane sideways in a gale," as Lance Armstrong put it.
Tour cyclists will not have regretted the team time trial's five-year absence from the Tour route: the unremitting nature of the collective effort, the need for the strong to maintain the pace and the weak to keep up with it, means that it can be merciless.
It presents other conundrums: whether to lose time waiting for a victim of fatigue or a puncture, or leave the stragglers to their own devices; what formation to choose; when to rest the weaker elements without tiring out the strongmen.
The wind, from head or side all the way, only added to the suffering.
"It was horrible, like banging your head into a wall the whole way," said Millar, who was no more successful than the last Briton to defend the yellow jersey in a team time trial, Chris Boardman, who lost the maillot jaune at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel before the Tour's brief British visit in 1994.
As expected, the masters yesterday were Jalabert and Abraham Olano's ONCE, who maintained their cohesion throughout, except for a few brief moments on the bridge when one of their climbers, Marcos Serrano, slipped painfully off the back of the string.
The team manager drove alongside him to provide some shelter so he could rejoin his team-mates; the race referees took a dim view of this and added 20 seconds to the team's time.
This took some of the sheen off their first victory in a team time trial in the Tour, and almost halved their initial, 46-second winning margin ahead of Armstrong's US Postal team.
So dominant last year, there was no Independence Day celebration as the Postmen showed their first signs of weakness this season or last. They lost three men en route, then split in two as Armstrong appeared to drive too hard up the bridge, and were forced to wait for two weak links: Frankie Andreu, and the little mountain man, Tyler Hamilton.
The 25 seconds they estimate this cost them was as nothing, however, compared to the disaster that awaited last year's runner-up Alex Zulle. In the road race stage that finished here last year, he lost six minutes due to a crash, and yesterday - shockingly for a team which could hold its own in this domain when they were led by Miguel Indurain - his Banesto team were four minutes behind their great Spanish rivals.
The 1998 winner, Jan Ullrich, had banked on losing a minute and was content to concede 40 seconds to Armstrong, and Marco Pantani dropped a relatively respectable 2:48 to the Texan.
But the day's biggest losers were, inevitably, from the climbing fraternity: Richard Virenque and last year's third finisher, Fernando Escartin, are now in the nether regions of the result sheets and have five days to wait for a climb more painful than yesterday's bridge of sighs.
