Before the Wall Street Journal thrust doping back front and center, one of the prevailing storylines at the Tour of California was how Lance Armstrong would race. He wasn’t there to win, as all but the dimmest of journalists understood.
But his performance there was crucial to his preparation for his main (only?) objective of the season, the Tour de France. And on that count, Armstrong and his team director Johan Bruyneel freely allowed that things weren’t exactly on schedule.
That didn’t get any better on stage 5, when Armstrong was caught in a crash just a few miles into the day’s ride and had to abandon. X-rays were negative (he had an elbow contusion and a cut below his eye that needed eight stitches), but what Armstrong lost was more than a little skin.
Three of the most crucial days of the race were stages 6, 7 and 8. By crashing out, Armstrong missed out on 352 hilly kilometers of road racing and an important 33.6-km time trial test.
At the pre-race press conference, Armstrong noted that he had only 50 days left until the Tour de France. “We’re not hitting the panic button yet,” he said, but alluded to a conscious effort to winnow his responsibilities to training and preparing for the Tour.
As of Wednesday, that’s down to just 38 days.
Armstrong tweeted that he’s back in Europe (southern France to be exact) and training again. CyclingNews reported that he’s rumored to be starting the Tour of Luxembourg. That race runs June 2-6 and would preclude him from starting the Dauphine Libere, but would fit on a schedule with the Tour of Switzerland (June 12-20).
It remains to be seen if that’s enough. Armstrong had a solid early spring through the Tour of Flanders, but a persistent stomach bug and other issues have kept him from being able to consistently build fitness to his standards.
This year’s Tour de France, like last year’s, is primarily backweighted in difficulty; most of the key mountain stages, and the only significant time trial, are in the race’s final week. But as the Giro d’Italia showed, any rider showing up to the race not on form risks losing serious time in the nervous racing that will likely dominate the start in The Netherlands.
(Aside: I’ll say it now and continually until July 3 – that first week is going to be crazy. Narrow roads, crosswinds and then the cobbles on Stage 3 are going to end someone’s Tour aspirations even if they’re still in the race.)
At the Tour of California, Armstrong said almost ruefully that at 38, going on 39, his body didn’t respond quite like it used to – it wasn’t, as he put it, as “programmable” any more. Setting aside any distractions over the Floyd Landis accusations, Armstrong has a lot of work to do, and not much time left to do it.
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