Young guns eye podium finish

Cycling / Tour de France: Iban Mayo saw the Tour for the first time in this attractive little Pyrenean foothill town four years ago. He rode his bike over the mountains from a hotel on the Spanish side to watch his friend and now colleague in the Euskaltel team, David Extebarria, take a stage win.

"Going home was terrible," Mayo recalled. "I had to go over the Aubisque and Somport passes, and climb to Astun where I was staying. I hadn't eaten enough, and got a terrible attack of hypoglycaemia."

Unable to ride any further he went to a police station and asked for help. After being turned away he went into the road, stopped the first car he saw, and hitched a lift home.

Mayo will have no such troubles when he rides out of Pau this morning, when he will be acclaimed by tens of thousands of fellow Basquesas, similar to what he has been since the Tour reached the Pyrenees last Saturday. In winning the stage to l'Alpe d'Huez on July 12th, and putting Lance Armstrong under pressure since, Mayo has been one of the great revelations of this Tour.

After it ends he will no doubt be tipped as Spain's next great cycling hope, following in the line of Miguel Indurain and Pedro Delgado. And yet, four years ago, not long after watching that Tour stage, it took a campaign by the press in the Basque country to force the local squad, Euskaltel, to offer him a professional contract.

It is likely that he will end up fighting for the third slot on the podium in Paris - behind Armstrong and Jan Ullrich - against the man whose aggression has given the Texan his hardest ride in recent Tours, Alexandr Vinokourov.

"Vino" has long been another talent in the wings, but he has always been assumed to be a man whose strength is stage races.

Whereas Mayo is that rare thing, a pure climber, and the product of the cycling traditions of the Basque country, Vino is an all-rounder, and a chip off the old Soviet bloc with a shining amateur career. He recalls being made to do 25-mile runs as a junior and says: "That was what taught me to suffer. And being from the old USSR, I have extra motivation to achieve what I want to do."

For most of his previous Tours, Vino's task was to assist Ullrich - a close friend - with whom he escaped in the Olympic Games road race in Sydney, taking silver to his mate's gold. He has been let off the leash this season, following the German's departure, and is still fired up by the death of another great friend, Andrei Kivilev, in March.

The third great revelation of this Tour is another domestique de luxe turned leader in his own right. Each day Armstrong's former assistant Tyler Hamilton has achieved the apparently impossible simply by being here, with his jersey zipped open to show the huge bandage holding his collarbone in place. If he does not crack today he should finish in the top 10 in Paris; next year, assuming he is intact, who knows what he might achieve?

Guardian Service