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Stage 4 - Huy to Verdun
07.11.01
No Rest For 'The Freckle'!
Stuart O’Grady today proved that a cool and calm attitude are as valuable as his strong, freckled legs and giant heart and lungs. It was a day of racing which provided the Tour de France with tough terrain, a thousand emotions and threatening surges which seemed sure to steal the yellow jersey off the Australian’s shoulders.
O’Grady lost his overall lead on several occasions, but he kept his cool - and will ride tomorrow's team time trial in yellow.
That the first threat came in the shape of O'Grady's US team-mate, Bobby Julich, was probably the one thing which stopped his brain from exploding with the stress of knowing that the thing he’d worked so hard to obtain was about to disappear as quickly as it arrived. But when the eventual stage winner, Laurent Jalabert, mounted his successful attack at the 185km mark (of the 215km stage), O’Grady was almost certain his yellow moment was over.
The Tour is known for its surplus of action. But this first week is traditionally a time when the peloton rolls along for the first few hours of the stage and the sprint teams take charge to ensure a rapid rush to the line. The 2001 Tour, however, isn’t quite being ridden according to that tradition. Yeah, there have been a moments of contemplation before the action heats up this year, but only for a matter of minutes: not hours like we’ve seen in the past.
The first attack came at the eighth kilometer today and, yeah, it amounted to little. But then came a series of climbs – and the surges then never ceased.
At the 52nd kilometer, Julich joined a crew of eight riders (from eight teams) who were keen enough to forge a name for themselves before the brutality of tomorrow’s team time trial that they buried their heads and cooperated for 81 kilometers. Julich began the day in sixth place overall. And he quickly made up the deficit to O’Grady’s lead to find himself the virtual leader of the Tour. At one point his escape yielded a 10 minute gain, and as O’Grady pointed out at the finish, “It was a scenario I could live with, because Bobby is a team-mate”.
But Bobby’s reputation as a possible contender for overall honors in Paris (courtesy of his 3rd-place in 1998) meant that a solid pursuit was required by the teams vying for that same honor. The US Postal and ONCE teams joined forces and picked up the pace of the chase. Lance Armstrong’s relationship with Julich could hardly be called a friendly one – and the result was the capture of Julich's escape, and a sigh of relief for O’Grady. No matter how pleased he might be for Julich to take the lead, surrendering the yellow for anyone – even a team-mate – isn’t something any cyclist would choose to do.
When Jalabert joined a surge by the perennial attacker, Ludo Dierckxsens, however, things were different. “I was pretty sure it was all over for me then,” confessed O’Grady at the finish. “We’d been going flat-out all day, and Jalabert only needed 39-seconds to take the lead.” Even as Agricole’s green soldiers pushed ahead in another pursuit, and pulled Jalabert’s break back from two minutes to under 30-seconds in the dying kilometers, there was still the time bonus for the win to consider. Sure, Jalabert got the stage and the bonus, but O’Grady’s legs carried him to within seven seconds of the Frenchman by the time he reached the line. Thanks to his team-mates (and with the help of a little last-minute cat-and-mouse tactics by Jalabert).
Tomorrow, O'Grady will ride off with his green-clad mates as the last squad in the team test. He’ll know what deficit he has to make up and he may well survive another day in yellow... but tomorrow is where the Tour proper was always due to begin. And with Armstrong and Ullrich within half a minute of his overall lead, there’ll surely be no rest for the Freckle as he attempt to equal his three days of yellow glory from 1998.
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