New route unveiled for Tour de France
Michael McDonough, Associated Press, Paris
Lance Armstrong's bid for a record-tying fifth Tour de France title just got easier.
The route for next year's 100th-anniversary race features more mountain stages than recent editions of the Tour - and Armstrong's iron legs like the mountains best.
"I don't think Lance Armstrong has anything to worry about in this itinerary," Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc said Thursday as he unveiled the 2003 stage-route. "There is scope for him to impose his superiority, if there is a superiority (next year)."
Four riders have won the world's toughest cycling race five times. Only Spain's Miguel Indurain captured all five titles back-to-back.
The three-week Tour is usually decided in the peaks, where cyclists can win or lose huge amounts of time. Armstrong sealed his fourth straight victory last July by crushing rivals in six mountain stages. A year earlier, there were five legs in the Alps and the Pyrenees.
Next year's edition, which starts in Paris on July 5 and ends in the French capital July 27, features seven mountain legs. The hardest is likely to be the 211-kilometer eighth stage from Sallanches to L'Alpe d'Huez.
Only three mountain stretches, however, end in exhausting uphill climbs. At 3,402.5 kilometers, the 20-stage race will be the seventh shortest in Tour history.
Although 2003 marks the 100th anniversary of the Tour, it will be the 90th edition of the race, which was canceled during each of the World Wars.
The prologue, a 6.5-kilometer individual time trial, takes riders through the west of Paris.
The first full stage on July 6 starts from outside the Stade de France. It then passes by the 'Reveil Matin' restaurant in the suburb of Montgeron, the starting point for the first ever Tour in 1903.
Cyclists then head into northeastern France before reaching Lyon, one of the stops in the six-stage 1903 Tour along with Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and Ville d'Avray outside Paris. They also feature in next year's event.
None of the stages starts or finishes outside France, although the 14th leg in the Pyrenees crosses briefly into Spain. There are two rest days, three individual time trials including the prologue, and one team time trial.
There will be 22 teams in next year's race, compared to 21 last year, with nine riders in each team. The top 14 squads in the International Cycling Union's end-of-year rankings qualify automatically, and Tour organizers will hand out eight wild cards in 2003, four of them in January and four in May.
The five-time Tour winners are Indurain, Bernard Hinault and the late Jacques Anquetil of France, and Belgium's Eddy Merckx. Armstrong is the first American to win the event more than three times.