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By Ivan Speck in Pau
Downhill from here: Armstrong (right) and Jose Ivan Gutierrez speed down Peyresourde passLance Armstrong paid a farewell tribute to the mountains which have bathed him in adulation during a glorious Tour de France career that now has just four more days to run.
The seven-times victor did not win the 125-mile slog over four Pyreneean summits to Pau, yet his place at the front of a dutiful procession to honour the Tour’s history was sufficient homage.
Armstrong’s final Tour is coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the first inclusion of the Pyrenees
on a Tour route. As a member of the breakaway group which crested the formidable Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque ahead of the peloton, the 38-year-old evoked memories of his own grandeur.
If he stopped short of waving at the misty-eyed spectators lining the fearsome climbs, there was no denying the pride of a retiring champion.
Armstrong said: ‘When you’re out there in the break, the fans can get close to you, they can talk to you and you can talk back to them. This whole Tour they have been very supportive of me.
‘They don’t have to come to the Tour. They don’t have to fly in from all over the world and stand on a hot roadside, but they do and I appreciate it.
‘I’m not the best guy in the race this year, but I still have the spirit of a fighter. I focused on the stage, got myself up in the moves but it didn’t work. I just wasn’t fast enough in the end.’
The man to catch: Spaniard Contador is still in possession of the yellow jerseyAfter a Tour in which he punctured on the cobbles of northern France and suffered three crashes in a day in the Alps, Armstrong could not match the pure straightline speed of Pierrick Fedrigo in the final sprint to the line in Pau. It didn’t matter.
His tribute had been delivered.
When the Pyrenees were first ridden in 1910 over the same four climbs on a stage measuring over 200 miles, the riders set out at three o’clock in the morning. The final one completed the course 22 hours later and the previous year’s Tour winner Octave Lapize famously yelled: ‘Assassins!’ at the race organisers as he crossed the final summit.
The roads are better paved nowadays, the bikes incomparably superior and the team support so all-encompassing that it is almost ludicrous to recall that in those early days riders had to repair their own bikes en route.
Still, though, the Pyrenees can sap a man’s will and when the 172 riders remaining from an original field of 198 reconvene for the final mountain stage after the rest day, the battle will be as much about nerve as peddling power.
French flyer: Fedrigo (left) celebrates on the finish line as he wins stage 16 ahead of Casar (2nd right)Do not fall for the false truce here between race leader Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck. Contador apologised for his opportunistic actions in attacking when his rival dropped a chain on Monday, yet the 39-second swing that resulted on the Port de Bales and the yellow jersey which came with it remain his. It is why the Spaniard was whistled again as he mounted the podium.
Schleck gave him a conciliatory hug after the finish in Pau, yet the gesture of goodwill extends no further than the start line of Thursday's pivotal climb back up the Col du Tourmalet.
Schleck said: ‘We talked today. What happened yesterday wasn’t something you would really like to see, but things happen in racing sometimes. We are good now.
‘It’s finished and on Thursday you’ll see a good war between Alberto and I. An eight-second gap is nothing in the third week of the Tour. I think that whoever gets to the top of the Tourmalet first will win the Tour.’
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