It was his toughest win yet. But when Lance Armstrong rode down the Champs-Elysees in the yellow jersey for a record-tying fifth consecutive time on Sunday he permanently secured his position among the great cyclists in Tour de France history.
The 31-year-old Texan joins Spanish great Miguel Indurain as the only two riders to have won cycling's most grueling and prestigious race five times in a row -- a record Armstrong will look to break next summer.
"It's a dream, really a dream," Armstrong said in French to the media after once again ascending the Paris podium in yellow. "I love cycling, I love my job and I will be back for a sixth."
But for Armstrong, the fifth tour was undoubtedly the hardest.
Armstrong began his five-year winning streak in the 1999 tour, just three years after surgery and chemotherapy for testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. In his first four tours, Armstrong, a member of the U.S. Postal Service team, rode into Paris with a comfortable six-minute lead or more. But this year's Tour was not destined to be so easy. Even Armstrong's final cushion of 61 seconds over second-place Jan Ullrich of Germany was not nearly so comfortable just days earlier.
In fact at one point Armstrong's two closest competitors were both within 18 seconds of snatching away the yellow leader's jersey.
The 100th anniversary Tour proved to be one of the closest and most exciting in years. Crashes, extreme weather, sickness and even political protests contributed to a level of excitement unrivaled in Armstrong's previous wins.
The Tour kicked off with a foreboding start for Armstrong, as he was still recovering from a stomach flu. Not long after, a gigantic pile-up took down over 35 cyclists on the first stage, including Armstrong and a few of his teammates. It wasn't until the eighth stage of the tour, a week into the race, that Armstrong finally put on the yellow jersey that has become synonymous with his name in recent years. But despite letting his lead dwindle to just seconds on multiple occasions, Armstrong refused to give up the jersey, wearing it proudly and with a smile as he rode into Paris Sunday.
As the Tour entered the grueling mountain stages in the Alps, it seemed Armstrong would pull away from the competition the way he had done so easily in his previous Tours. But it was not to be. The competition, including Ullrich and the third-place finisher Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, challenged and pushed Armstrong repeatedly.
Armstrong left the Alps without the insurmountable lead he had grown accustomed to in previous years, and for the first time since 1999 he looked human and even vulnerable perhaps.
His troubles continued in the first individual time trial. Going into the tour Armstrong had lost just one individual time trial since 1999. But as the riders prepared for the 47-kilometer race temperatures reached nearly 106 degrees.
Armstrong was far from top form, and later found to be dangerously dehydrated, as he dropped 96 seconds to Ullrich, finishing in second place for the stage, and just 15 seconds ahead of Ullrich for the overall lead. Team leaders reported after the stage that Armstrong had lost 11 pounds of water in the time trial as he wilted in the scorching heat of Southern France. His performance prompted further speculation that at age 31, he was too old to win a fifth Tour.
And as the Tour entered its second mountain range, the Pyrenees on the border of France and Spain, the fate of the yellow jersey seemed to be up in the air.
But Armstrong responded just three days later on a mist-shrouded 8.3-mile ascent to the ski station of Luz-Ardiden, one of the Tour's hardest climbs.
After an earlier attack from Ullrich which caught Armstrong off guard, but which he eventually recovered from, the two rode side by side as they began the final climb. Early in the climb Armstrong followed the lead of Spanish rider Iban Mayo in attacking the lead pack of riders, leaving Ullrich grimacing as he strained to counter the attack.
But just as Armstrong was pulling away, in one of the Tour's most dramatic moments, he clipped a roadside spectator with his handlebars and was thrown to the ground. Ullrich passed the downed American just seconds later, but slowed with the other riders in the lead group to wait up for Armstrong, in accordance with an unwritten cycling rule that mandates that riders not take advantage of the misfortunes of others. Ullrich may have been returning a favor, as Armstrong had slowed and waited for him two-years ago under similar circumstances.
Once the yellow jersey had returned to the lead pack of riders, the pace picked back up, and just moments later Armstrong staged an attack that the other riders could not counter. He shot up the slope pushing for every extra second, winning the stage and increasing his buffer to 65 seconds over Ullrich.
It was Armstrong's only stage win in the Tour and marked a turning point in his pursuit of a fifth win.
"At the start of the climb, I knew that that was where I needed to win the Tour," Armstrong said. "At the finish I was confident that that was enough."
But there was still another individual time trial remaining the day before the riders entered Paris, and if Armstrong were to give up the same amount of time he had yielded in the first time trial, his lead would not be safe. But the 49-kilometer stage 19 was plagued by rain and Ullrich found difficulty cutting into Armstrong's lead. When his bike slipped out from under him on the slick roads 12 kilometers from the stage finish it marked the end of his pursuit of a Tour win.
Besides Armstrong and Indurain, just three other riders have won the Tour five times, but not consecutively. They are Belgium's Eddy Merckx, and Frenchmen Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault.
Indurain, who won the Tour from 1991-95, said Armstrong would be hard-pressed to win the Tour for a sixth time.
"Of course, it's possible. But every year it gets more difficult, and he'll face some tough rivals,'" he said.
The other American cyclist of note was fourth-place Tyler Hamilton, who had previously raced alongside Armstrong as a U.S. Postal teammate. Hamilton suffered a broken collarbone in the stage 1 crash but persevered to win the 16th stage and fell just minutes short of a podium finish.
In previous years, Armstrong said, his preparations for the following Tour began almost immediately after his victory celebrations in Paris. But after such a grueling Tour this year, he make take a little more time to savor the win this time around.
"This Tour took a lot out of me," he said. "I need to step back from cycling and from the races and relax a little bit and focus on 2004 in due time."
