Lance Armstrong will begin to find out whether his gamble to return to the Tour de France is a credible one when the seven-times champion tackles a tough opener in front of Monaco\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s casino on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Organisers broke with the tradition of short prologues by staging a 15.5-km first act which could allow the stage winner to keep the coveted race leader\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s yellow jersey for some time.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153In 2005, on such a course, I would have destroyed the race and made huge gaps,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Armstrong, who returned to racing in January after 3 1\/2 years in retirement.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a good course for me, hard and technical. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lived here. I know the roads like the back of my hand. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no longer 2005,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 …\u00c2\u00a0 Details<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lance Armstrong will begin to find out whether his gamble to return to the Tour de France is a credible one when the seven-times champion tackles a tough opener in front of Monaco\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s casino on Saturday. Organisers broke with the tradition of short prologues by staging a 15.5-km first act which could allow the stage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-road-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15581,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15580\/revisions\/15581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}