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Outside Magazine, July 2004
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2004 Tour de France: The Ultimate Guide
They're Dancing on the Pedals
Holy bitumen! It's Phil and Paul, the excitable Brits who give le Tour its champagne gush.

By Will Palmer

BASTILLE DAY in the French Alps: Alexandre Vinokourov is screaming down the Côte de la Rochette, on his way to winning Stage 9 in the 2003 Tour de France. Fifteen seconds behind him on the mountain, Spain's Joseba Beloki is desperately trying to keep the Kazakh rider in his sights, and Lance Armstrong, seeing his lead eroding under the aggressive attack, is clinging to Beloki's back wheel. France is in the middle of a heat wave; the surface temperature is around 125.

"Look at the road," comes the clipped, velvet voice of commentator Phil Liggett, going out live on the Outdoor Life Network. "The sun has melted the bitumen today," he says, using the British term for asphalt, "and it's making it very, very slippery indeed."

Ten seconds after Liggett makes the call, Beloki hits a slick spot, fishtails, pumps his brake one tragic time, and goes down in a sickening 40-mile-per-hour spill. His femur, elbow, and wrist
Tour de France 2004
CLICK HERE for Outside’s Guide to the 2004 Tour de France, and follow the race July 3-25 with our SPECIAL ONLINE COVERAGE.
are instantly broken, and his run at the yellow jersey—in many analysts' minds, the most serious threat that year to Lance's fifth-straight victory—is kaput. With about a second to avoid the wreckage, Armstrong veers left and off the road, narrowly missing a gaping ditch, and glides into a farmer's field.

The drama is not, however, relegated to the race alone. In the broadcasting booth, as Beloki's crack-up and Lance's grace-under-pressure move are playing on the monitors, something rare happens: Phil Liggett, the dean of cycling announcers, a man who's seen it all in 31 years of covering the Tour and has matched the turbulence of the event's great moments with language straight out of a lit prof's lecture notes—where the athletes are "great avengers" who "turn the first pedal in anger" and "cross swords at the front"—is at a loss for words.

"Oh!" Liggett blurts. "And oh! Beloki's gone down and Armstrong's taken to the grass! This—oh! They—and oh! I hope Beloki's not hurt; that was an awful crash. Armstrong's—as a grown, ah, ah, the, ah ... Armstrong is now crossing the course. I have never seen that in ... my ... life ..."


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WILL PALMER is Outside's copy chief.
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