No halting his drive for five
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
Surely, this was where it was going to end ingloriously and painfully for Lance Armstrong, keister-over-handle-bars on a stretch of bubbling road tar during a hell-bent descent from the French Alps.
That was where his closest and most daring challenger, Spain's Joseba Beloki, exited the Tour de France on the road from Cote de La Rochette yesterday, carried off by ambulance after a spill that produced a broken right leg, elbow and wrist.
It was a fate that Armstrong, slightly behind Beloki at the time, seemed destined to share. Even when Armstrong instinctively swerved sharply off the road, not knowing whether a ditch awaited him, it could have easily been the end. And, for anybody else, it might well have been.
Instead, the four-time champion negotiated his way across a hay field, dismounted and took his bike down a slight hill where he rejoined the race. He finished fourth in the 114-mile stage in searing 90-degree heat and retained the overall lead one stage short of today's halfway point.
Another day, another challenge and another addition to the growing believe-it-or-not legend of Armstrong. Not for nothing has he become the most remarkable performer in sports.
In this, his most harrowing of Tours since returning from what was supposed to have been his death bed seven years ago, Armstrong has not lacked for new challenges on a regular basis. They have lurked around each picturesque bend and hairpin turn of the French countryside.
It isn't just the 200-man field, since whittled to 170, that Armstrong drives himself to compete against in attempting to become only the second rider to win the world's most exacting athletic event five consecutive times. There was the bout of stomach flu that he suffered the week before the Tour, not the way you want to begin a beyond-grueling 2,125-mile, 23-day event.
Then came the 35-rider pileup on the second day, when he was thrown from his bike, and the defective brake on Sunday.
Amid whispers of his vulnerability at age 31 — emboldened talk that he might no longer be the force he has been in the mountains and ripe for upset — nothing has kept Armstrong from the leader's yellow jersey.
Perhaps we should no longer be surprised, of course. Maybe we should realize by now that Armstrong is of another breed and playing by different rules. That he is both fanatically driven and divinely blessed.
The result is that he has been practically indestructible and, on two wheels, all but unbeatable. Things that would kill or at least sideline mere mortals have long since become for him just obstacles to be overcome.
After all, if cancer and chemotherapy couldn't keep him down, then what chance does a treacherous patch of road tar really have?
