The 4th stage couldnt be more contrasting for race leader uptill the 3rd stage, Zabriskie race leader after the 4th stage, Armstrong. With a little more than a kilometer to go to the finish, Zabriskie crashed, fell and lost precious time.

If he had crashed within the last km, according to the rule he could take the time of the last rider of his team in the TTT. Armstrong and the Discovery Team, strongest in the trials, proved exactly that and more as the official web site of the letour reports:

The Discovery Channel team has set the fastest average speed for a team time trial in the Tour de France. The nine riders finished the 67.5km course in one hour, 10 minutes and 39 seconds. The average speed is 57.31km/h - eclipsing the previous best (that of Gewiss-Ballan from 1995 - 54.930km/h).

The question every one is asking is how Armstrong’s body will cope next week in the mountains. We will see.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Cycling, Tour de France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.