Lance lays early iron grip on yellow jersey

Scott Dougal

The nearest rider to him in the general classification is his Discovery team-mate George Hincapie, 55 seconds behind the Texan, while Team CSC's Jen Voight is next best nine seconds further back.

Armstrong, who is chasing a seventh Tour de France, said: "The entire team was strong.

"It's good for us internally and it's good for us externally to say to the world we're ready and if we have the jersey we can defend it.

"We tried to start hard and it was difficult with the tailwind to lift the speed. Everybody went fast and it's tough to take back time."

With CSC finishing two seconds behind Discovery, yesterday meant an end to David Zabriskie's time in yellow.

But what would have been a disappointing moment for the Utah-born rider was made extremely painful when he fell after seeming to clip the wheel of the rider ahead of him.

The 26-year-old was left behind by his team-mates, who had to drive on for fear of their other contenders losing too much time, although the 'chute' was enough of a distraction to cost them the two seconds between first and second place.

Zabriskie cut a very sad figure as he free-wheeled over the line, his yellow jersey bloodied and torn.

But, while it was not hard to feel sorry for Zabriskie, there were other riders for whom yesterday represented another hard punch to roll with.

Having been passed on the road by Armstrong in Saturday's individual time-trial, T-Mobile's Jan Ullrich is now one minute, 36 seconds behind his great rival.

Two other contenders fared much worse. Roberto Heras is almost three minutes behind while Iban Mayo is over five minutes adrift.

It means CSC and T-Mobile remain the team most likely to provide a challenger for Armstrong.

CSC's Bobby Julich is just over a minute slower than his fellow American and their highly-rated Italian Ivan Basso is 86 seconds off the pace.

As well as Ullrich, T-Mobile also have Alexandre Vinokourov as a possible contender but he is 81 seconds behind.

Those are still substantial gaps and the product of an impressive display from Discovery who lived up to their reputation as the strongest team in the Tour.

They certainly needed to be as the speed record for the team time-trial was broken by several teams.

Davitamon-Lotton were first, bettering the mark of 54.930 kilometres per hour set by Gewiss-Ballan in 1995 by motoring home with an average of 55.33km/h, and he finished 11th.

By contrast, Armstrong's Discovery finished the 67.5km journey from Tours to Blois in one hour, 10 minutes and 39 seconds an average of 57.324km/h.