By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

So much for "Lance-proofing" the Tour de France this year. After Lance Armstrong's third consecutive triumph last year, organizers had vowed to make cycling's most demanding test more wide open and competitive.

They pledged to bring back the suspense that Armstrong has come to drain from it like a water bottle on a hot day in Provence.

"We were criticized because nothing happened in the final stage (in 2001)," Jean-Marie Leblanc of the Tour had said. This time, "the suspense will be maintained as far as possible until the finish," he promised.

So, they put their heads together and did some cutting and pasting with the route. They shortened the race to a record 2,034.8 miles. They put four of the six mountain stages in the final eight days and brought back the barren and forbidding 6,260-foot Mont Ventoux that French philosopher Roland Barthes has called, "a God of Evil."

And, now, like the huffing, puffing remnants of what had been the 189-man field that pedaled off hopefully from Luxembourg 17 days ago, the officials, too, have thrown up their hands in frustration.

With five stages remaining and Armstrong holding a 4-minute, 21-second lead, it is looking as if only a head-over-heels tumble down the Alps this week or some similarly unforeseen tragedy is going to keep him from heading the annual parade up the Champs-Elysees come Sunday.

If the field doesn't make up a significant block of time in today's 16th stage through the mountain passes of Col du Galiber and Col de la Madeleine, chances are they won't get it done at all.

How remarkable, then, is it that with 632 miles left — roughly the distance from Phoenix to Sacramento — this one is, for all intents and purposes, already over?

"We will keep fighting — just in case he has a bad day," said Raimondas Rumsas, one of the riders, hopefully but none-too-confidently yesterday after Armstrong maintained his lead through stage 15.

That is what it has apparently come to — prayers and maybe pins in voodoo dolls — to stop the most amazing ongoing run in sports, because perilous hairpin turns, oxygen-depleting heights and forceful winds have not.

Nothing else seems capable of halting Armstrong's determined march through the picturesque European countryside and into the record books. Neither the aggressive climbers from Spain, and their early bravado about Armstrong supposedly having lost an edge, nor regular drug testing have been able to detour the 30-year old Texan in this one.

This Tour came billed as "Lance vs. The World" and it looks like the world is in danger of getting routed — again.