Wheels come off for Riis

The yellow, green and red-spotted jerseys may be sitting firmly on the shoulders of Jan Ullrich, Erik Zabel and Richard Virenque, but there were still issues to be decided yesterday, as last year's winner Bjarne Riis found out to his cost when the Tour passed into Switzerland.

Riis has had a torrid Tour, and has had to cede leadership of the Deutsche Telekom team to the rampant Ullrich. On Monday's final Alpine stage into Morzine, Riis lost third place overall to the little Italian climber Marco Pantani. He showed signs of being unable to cope with the pressure, shutting himself up in the team's mobile home before each stage to avoid the media.

Pantani knows that Saturday's time trial stage around Eurodisney will favour the Dane, so when he noticed that Riis was struggling on yesterday's first climb, the Pas de Morgins, he ordered his Mercatone Uno team to put on the pressure. Riis regained contact, but his effort cost him valuable energy.

The Dane cracked completely on the day's main climb, the Col de la Croix. Here Pantani's domestiques set a blistering pace. With over 50 mainly downhill miles to the finish in Fribourg, Riis should not in theory have had too much trouble catching up with Pantani, but `Elefantino' and his men were assisted with the pacemaking by the Spaniard Abraham Olano's team mates. They realised that if the Dane could be left far enough behind, their man might be able to sneak past him into fifth.

Pantani's two domestiques and Olano's four assistants kept the pace hovering at around 35 miles per hour. Behind, Riis had no team-mates to assist him, and by the finish the gap had opened to six minutes, and he had slipped from fourth overall to seventh. There had to be a reason for his loss of form, and yesterday evening his team reported that he was ill.

The other issue on many minds as the Tour left the Alps was stage wins. As of yesterday morning 14 of the 22 teams in the race had yet to win anything. The squad sponsored by the French national lottery, La Francaise des Jeux, were under particular pressure. They are a new, big budget outfit, and have mounted a vast marketing operation around the Tour. The little known Christophe Mengin, nominally the understudy to Stephane Heulot, burst through in the final metres yesterday to save the team's blushes.