CYCLING Tour competitors wait for their chance to win
Armstrong changed the Tour de France for good.
PARIS (AP) -- He's run them ragged for six straight years and injected American star power into the Tour de France. Many rivals of Lance Armstrong, cowed by his unparalleled success, are eagerly waiting for his flame to burn out.
The Texan made history Sunday when he rode across the finish line wearing the Tour leader's yellow jersey on the Champs-Elys & eacute;es for a record sixth time.
Doubts remain about when he'll try for No. 7, but for some, the retirement party couldn't come soon enough.
"In the last few years, we've been working a bit for the future -- for the post-Armstrong -- because he's simply unbeatable," said Eusebio Unzue, sporting director for Spanish team Illes Balears-B. Santander.
Among possible Armstrong successors, the biggest buzz is about 26-year-old Italian Ivan Basso. He finished third after coming in 11th in 2002 and seventh a year ago.
Illes Balears features young Russian stars Vladimir Karpets and Denis Menchov -- respectively the best young Tour riders this year and last. Team leader Francisco Mancebo was sixth overall in 2004.
Just waiting
"Mancebo is just waiting for him (Armstrong) to leave -- as we all are," Unzue said.
Since Armstrong's reign began in 1999, rivals have pursued the scraps he left behind, collecting impressive -- albeit lesser -- laurels as the race's best climber, sprinter or young rider.
A cartoon Monday in sports daily L'Equipe showed a wanted poster with a half-dozen pictures of Armstrong and the caption: "It's been six years we've been chasing after him!"
Rivals can take heart. At 32, Armstrong is much closer to the end of his career than the beginning. On Sunday, he vowed to race again in his favorite competition but not necessarily next year. The next generation will inherit Armstrong's mark on the Tour's culture. He has helped remold the race into a professional, rigorous affair.
Riders now study course routes much more than before. Meticulous training regimens, top-dollar sponsorships, and technological advances like rider radios and earphones are now commonplace.
Even after three victories by fellow American Greg Lemond in 1986, 1989 and 1990, the Tour was still largely a parochial, while celebrated, European affair until Armstrong came along.
He dragged the three-week marathon into prime-time.
His remarkable comeback from testicular cancer to win cycling's showcase race created millions more fans worldwide.
Armstrong brought laser-like focus -- and largely ignored other major races such as the Italian Giro or Spanish Vuelta.
Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team has set a new bar for performance, by concentrating all its firepower around helping its star win, said Bobby Julich, a CSC teammate of Basso.
More preparation
"U.S. Postal does the most preparation, and we are starting to prepare like that also," Julich said. "I think we have a future Tour winner with Ivan Basso -- so I'm sure we're going to be committing a lot more effort to doing the sort of things that Postal has done.
"He's made it more clinical. He's a surgeon, man, and he goes to work," Julich said of Armstrong.
Critics complain he has brought an American mind-set to the race, making it more methodical and calculated -- and yanking the competition away from its European roots.
Before his day, "an American in cycling was comparable to a French baseball team in the World Series," Armstrong wrote in his book, "It's Not About the Bike."
"There was a big difference between the discreet jockeying of European cycling, and the swaggering, trash-talking American idea of competition I was reared with," he wrote.
U.S. fans are just as brash. A roadside banner on the mythical L'Alpe d'Huez featured a map of France in U.S. stars and stripes with the words: "American owned and operated since 1999."