A brief look at Saturday’s eighth stage of the Tour de France:
Stage: A 109.7-mile trek featuring three big climbs from Andorra La Vella, Andorra, to Saint-Girons, France.
Winner: Spain’s Luis Leon Sanchez, in a sprint ahead of three other breakaway riders. Sanchez won the Paris-Nice stage race in March. He crossed the line just ahead of France’s Sandy Casar and Mikel Astarloza of Spain.
Yellow Jersey: Rinaldo Nocentini of the AG2R-La Mondiale team, who earned …Â Details
BARCELONA, Spain – If he hadn’t made the most significant decision in recent cycling history, Lance Armstrong would probably have been relaxing in Texas on Thursday, a smattering of pudge around his middle and his family by his side.
Despite the creature comforts his comeback has forced him to forsake, and even with a broken collarbone in his preparation for the Tour de France, there haven’t been many days when Armstrong has pined for home while on his bike.
An intensity of focus has been the constant thread through Armstrong’s career, the refusal to take as much as … Details
Since the first American cyclist made his way to the European pro circuit in the mid-’70s, enough gaffes, misunderstandings and flashpoints have taken place to keep a U.N. peacekeeping force busy — from Greg LeMond’s spending the Tour de France rest day playing golf, to the conversion of La Taverne Zimmer, the Montmartre bar in which the Tour was hatched at the turn of the century, into a TGI Friday’s. Among the lowlights:
1981
Sizing up the first American ever to ride the Tour de France, legendary French racing director Cyrille Guimard calls Jonathan Boyer un marginal, or weirdo — a reference to Boyer being, among other things, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a vegetarian, and a believer in acupuncture.
1984
After the World Championship road race in Barcelona, Greg LeMond publicly gripes that during the race Italy’s Moreno Argentin had offered to help him win for $10,000.