Armstrong tightens grip on Le Tour

Lance Armstrong heads for the Pyrenees in the yellow jersey with his grip on the Tour de France as tight as ever after a 13th stage won by Robbie McEwen of Australia today.

Armstrong, usually indomitable in the mountains, knows that if he can negotiate the peaks in his usual buccaneering style that he will be virtually certain of bowing out with a seventh Tour win.

Armstrong, who will quit the Tour after this year’s race, remained 38 seconds ahead of second-placed Dane Michael Rasmussen and two minutes 34 seconds clear of Frenchman Christophe Moreau after the stage.

Meanwhile McEwen, of the Davitamon-Lotto team, produced a perfectly-timed sprint to beat fellow Aussie Stuart O’Grady with McEwen’s team-mate Freddy Rodriguez finishing third after a 173.5km ride from Miramas to Montpellier.

It was a fine win for McEwen – his third stage win in this year’s Tour – and the Aussie praised his team after the peloton successfully foiled a breakaway group of five riders, who at one stage had built up a nine-minute lead.

Juan Antonio Flecha, Christopher Horner, Ludovic Turpin, Carlos Da Cruz and Thomas Voeckler were the five men and 50km into the stage they had established a lead of more than nine minutes.

The peloton then decided to react and gradually the advantage diminished.

The retirement of an injured Alejandro Valverde of Spain depleted a peloton already reduced to 162 by this morning from a field that had been 198-strong on July 2 when the race got underway in La Vendee.

Valverde had won the 10th stage in the Alps, pipping Armstrong to victory and was also wearing the white jersey for best young rider at the time of his retirement from the race.

Meanwhile, the supremely relaxed Armstrong, as usual tightly surrounded by his Discovery Channel team-mates at the head of the peloton, again showed his confidence as he laughed and joked with the motorbike TV crew that was shadowing him.

The Pyrenees have been the scene of many of Armstrong’s most memorable wins and with the likes of Jan Ullrich and Alexander Vonokourov already looking well beaten the race looks to be there for the taking for Armstrong.

Armstrong, regardless of the outcome of this year’s race, is already the most successful rider in the event’s 102-year history with six victories since his amazing recovery from cancer in the late 1990s.