Magnifique! A dominating performance in the mountains won Lance Armstrong, the new master of the peloton, his third straight Tour de France

It was a simple question, posed on the eve of the 17th stage of
the Tour de France. It was 11:15 p.m. in the darkened restaurant
of an old stone hotel in a town called Brive-la-Galliarde, but
Lance Armstrong wasn't sleepy. As a weary waiter with a napkin
slung over his shoulder laid out place settings for the next
morning's breakfast, the world's best cyclist shot the breeze.

He spoke of his high hopes for the Texas Longhorns offense next
season and of his eagerness to reunite the next day with his wife
and son, whom he hadn't seen for nearly a week. He held forth on
the three Tour stages he had already won (he would add a fourth
two days later) and on a friend he had lost. One question stopped
the torrent of words: Are you the patron?

The patron is the unquestioned boss of the peloton, a dominant
personality who commands favors, respect, even fear from the
other riders in the Tour. He admonishes and badgers, bestows
blessings and bears grudges. Had Armstrong become that person?
He hemmed and hawed and finally offered what Woodward and
Bernstein would have recognized as a nondenial denial. "I think
the days of the true patrons are over," he said. "There are a
lot of leaders, a lot of guys who command a lot of respect.
Maybe I'm one of those."

Four days later the 29-year-old Texan rode up the Champs-Elysees
to claim his third consecutive Tour victory. He finished six
minutes and 44 seconds ahead of Jan Ullrich of Team Deutsche
Telekom, who had basically conceded the race a week earlier.
Armstrong's short, familiar trip up the podium belied the long
ascent he has made over nine years. In that time he has gone from
tactically inept kid--a brash rider with an amazing gift but no
clue as to how to use it--to inspirational cancer survivor to the
most dominant figure in his sport.

His triumph on Sunday put Armstrong in elite company. He is one
of only eight riders since the Tour began in 1903 to have won the
race at least three times. While he is not the only American in
that group--Greg LeMond won in 1986, '89 and '90--no other American
has commanded so much respect in the peloton. Ironically,
Armstrong has yet to earn LeMond's respect (page 38), but other
legends of the Tour are less grudging with their endorsements.

"Armstrong could win five, he could win six, he could win seven,"
says five-time Tour winner Eddy (the Cannibal) Merckx, 56, widely
considered the greatest cyclist ever, "as long as he stays
focused on the Tour de France." Merckx made this prediction last
Thursday while walking in the Loire Valley town of Montlucon with
Bernard Hinault, 46, who, like Merckx, is a quintuple Tour
winner. (Merckx won from 1969 through '72 and in '74; Hinault in
'78, '79, '81, '82 and '85.) Each of these men, in his day, was
the iron-fisted boss of the peloton. When the tactics of opposing
teams became irksome to Hinault, for instance, he would ride to
the front and punish the offenders by setting an inhuman pace for
an hour or so.

Although cycling has seen dominant riders, the sport has not had
a true patron in more than a decade--not since Hinault's last
Tour, in 1986. LeMond's Tour wins were stretched over five years
at a time when cycling was still chauvinistically European.
Miguel Indurain, who won the race five times in a row beginning
in '91, was a quiet farm boy with no interest in the job of
patron.

But over the last year Armstrong has proved to be a worthy
successor to Hinault. Armstrong didn't just win this Tour; he won
with courage and panache, doing Ullrich the favor of easing up in
the moments after the German crashed in the Pyrenees during the
13th stage and offering a victory in that same stage to Laurent
Jalabert (who was too knackered to take him up on it). "It's been
a long time since cycling had a real boss," says Johan Bruyneel,
director of the U.S. Postal Service team, for which Armstrong
rides, and a former Tour rider. "Right now in the Tour de France,
people consider Lance the boss."

He wields power in matters large and small. For example, one of
the Tour's quaint traditions allows riders to sprint two or three
minutes ahead if the course goes through their hometown. All
requests for such privileges now go through Armstrong. "He is the
big sheriff," says Italian rider Davide Bramati, a member of the
Mapei-Quick Step team. "He is the law in the peloton."

Armstrong's rise to sheriff has been gradual and unlikely. He
began his pro career as the sort of insolent hothead that a
patron would feel compelled to rap on the knuckles. He infuriated
his elders by attacking (I'm young, I've got legs, I'm from
Texas--I'm going!) at inappropriate times. In Armstrong's book
It's Not About the Bike, he recalls an incident from one of his
first pro races, in the early '90s, in which former world
champion Moreno Argentin mistook him for another American, Andy
Bishop. Insulted, Armstrong responded with a profane blast. He
had a lot to learn.

Each year Armstrong has gained a clearer understanding of the
rules of the game. After racing the great Italian climber Marco
Pantani up murderous Mont Ventoux in last year's Tour, he eased
up at the line, allowing the Italian to win the stage. Pantani,
nothing if not proud, was insulted rather than moved by the
gesture. He found it patronizing and didn't hesitate to say so.

With no Pantani to contend with this year, Armstrong dominated
the mountain stages. While his victory on the fabled Alpe d'Huez
made the best theater--he pantomimed agony to deceive his
opponents--not until stage 13 on July 21, the penultimate day in
the mountains, did he break the will of Ullrich and put the race
on ice. The course took the peloton 121 miles over six cols, or
peaks, in the Pyrenees en route to a ski station called Pla
d'Adet. Four of the peaks were rated one (climbs are ranked on a
scale of four to one; the lower the number, the nastier the
ascent), and the final climb was hors categorie, beyond
category--the Tour's way of saying, You don't want to know.

Armstrong started the stage in third place overall, four minutes
up on Ullrich but nine behind Team Bonjour's Francois Simon, the
race leader. The first rated climb took the riders to a jagged
summit called Col du Portet d'Aspet, a pass with a precipitous
descent. Speeding down this mountain during the Tour six years
earlier, Fabio Casartelli of Italy had lost control of his bike,
crashed into a concrete barrier and died, leaving a widow and a
one-month-old son. One of Casartelli's Motorola teammates at the
time was the then 23-year-old Armstrong.

On a training ride in June, Armstrong had gone past the spot of
Casartelli's accident, now marked with a marble memorial.
Armstrong had gotten off his bike and wept. As he zipped past the
memorial on stage 13, Armstrong felt a surge of confidence. "I
knew I was going to win that day," he would say.

Others had different ideas. Jalabert, the redoubtable French
climbing specialist, got loose on a solo breakaway that lasted
nearly 60 miles, to the delight of the half million or so
spectators lining the mountain passes. An increasingly desperate
Ullrich, meanwhile, kept the pressure on Armstrong, right until
the moment he went off the road on his way down the Col de
Peyrosourde, somersaulting into a creek. Seeing the crash,
Armstrong slowed. He had no desire to profit from his rival's
accident. Only after Ullrich had hauled his bike out of the creek
and been back in the saddle for a while did Armstrong ride away
from him, past Jalabert and into the yellow jersey.

Not everyone was celebrating Armstrong's ascent. Jean-Marie
LeBlanc, the Tour's directeur general, had criticized him in a
French paper for lack of "warmth," for his unwillingness to speak
French and for his decision to retain two bodyguards--or, as
LeBlanc called them, "gorillas." While Armstrong shrugged off the
remarks, they stung. "The truth is," he said with four days left
in race, "I've really tried to respect the event and the French
people." Indeed, Armstrong, who has a home near Nice, often signs
autographs and conducts interviews in French, though, as he
admits, "the little French I do have is brutal and ugly and
sparse."

The French have been slow to warm to him. They resent the fact
that while their heroes, foremost among them Richard Virenque,
the second-place finisher in the '97 Tour, have been disgraced by
revelations of doping, the American who has a stranglehold on
their most prized sporting event continues to test clean. If he
isn't on drugs, they wonder, then how is he doing it?

It doesn't hurt that Armstrong trains harder than anyone else in
the sport. While other teams focus on the spring classics,
Armstrong and select Posties are riding the Alps and Pyrenees.
Often he heads into the mountains alone. After hammering up the
Col de Madeleine on a rainy day in May, he was frustrated to
learn that L'Alpe d'Huez was snowed in. "Anyone else would've
gotten in the car, had some hot tea and gone home," says
Bruyneel. "Lance turned his bike around, rode to the bottom of
the Madeleine and went up it again, just so he could get another
big climb that day."

That singlemindedness, that strength and strength of will, are
Armstrong's chief currency in the peloton. "I am very passionate
about cycling," says the Dutch rider Erik Dekker, who won three
stages at last year's Tour, "but I cannot match Lance. Mentally,
he is unique."

He is also the beneficiary of a superb, selfless team whose
primary goal is to win the Tour de France. After Armstrong was
isolated on some key climbs last year, U.S. Postal brought in the
cycling equivalent of two juco transfers: Roberto Heras and Jose
Luis Rubiera of Spain. Heras is one of the world's best pure
climbers and Rubiera is his trusted lieutenant. There they were,
escorting Armstrong on the last ascent of the final mountain
stage. "It was perfect protection," says Armstrong. "It was a
clinic."

When Ullrich attacked for the final time, less than a mile from
the summit on the way to Luz-Ardiden in stage 14, Armstrong
pulled even with him. As they crossed the line together, the
German extended his right hand, which Armstrong grasped. It was a
gracious gesture--a gesture, Ullrich would explain, of concession.
It was the gesture of a man who knows who is boss.

COLOR PHOTO: COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY GERARD RANCINAN COVER He Delivers The incomparable Lance Armstrong

COLOR PHOTO: LAURENT REBOURS/AP A dominating performance in the mountains won Lance Armstrong (far left, with teammates) his third straight Tour de France. [T of C]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY XAVIER WATEL/PRESSE SPORTS/L'EQUIPE Lone Star Fresh off his first stage win and en route to No. 2 in the Alps, Armstrong was a crowd pleaser on the road to Chamrousse.

COLOR PHOTO: JOEL SAGET/AFP Rock solid As the riders climbed L'Alpe d'Huez, Armstrong (below and fourth from far right) made his first big move of the Tour.

COLOR PHOTO: PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP [See caption above]

COLOR PHOTO: ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS Triomphe indeed The final 10 laps along the Champs-Elysees were pure pleasure for Armstrong (in yellow jersey).

Shadow of Doubt
Former Tour champ Greg LeMond views his successor with suspicion

Lance Armstrong shouldn't hold his breath waiting for a
congratulatory phone call from Greg LeMond, the only other
American to have won the Tour de France. "To be honest, I haven't
watched any of the Tour this year," LeMond said last Friday from
his home in suburban Minneapolis. "I've been fishing for the last
three weeks in Montana, so I don't know very much about what's
going on."

But as LeMond spoke, it became clear that he believes he knows
more than a little about what's going on. "I was deeply
saddened," he said, "to hear about Lance's relationship with Dr.
Michele Ferrari," who is awaiting trial in Italy on charges of
providing riders with erythropoietin (EPO), a banned substance
that increases red-blood-cell count. On the eve of the Tour, The
Sunday Times of London reported that Armstrong had visited
Ferrari five times since March 1999. "Have I been tested by him,
gone there and consulted on certain things?" Armstrong told the
paper. "Perhaps."

Visits prove nothing, of course. Armstrong has been among the
most frequently drug-tested riders over the last three years and
has never failed a test. He describes Ferrari as a friend he came
to know in the "small community" of cycling, and at a press
conference on July 23 he called him "a fair man and an innocent
man...Let there be a trial."

There will be a trial. Among the names likely to arise is that of
Kevin Livingston, Armstrong's former domestique and friend, whose
name appears in confiscated files of the good doctor, according
to The Sunday Times. "I wish with all my heart that the story is
the way he [Armstrong] tells it," said Lemond. "Ferrari is a
cancer in sports, and it's sad that Lance has had a five-year
relationship with him. I would have all the praise in the world
for Lance if I thought he was clean, but until Dr. Ferrari's
trial, we can't know for sure. It sounds like I'm bitter or
jealous about Lance Armstrong, but I'm not."

--A.M.

"He is the big sheriff," Italian rider Davide Bramati says of
Armstrong. "He is the law in the peloton."