Vive le Lance!

What a great Tour de France this year. Excitement everyday, where you could see team strategies at work, shifting not just every day, but minute-by-minute, with every new attack or breakaway on the road. Drama, where the Tour championship was decided on the last "real" day of the Tour, in an individual time trial on a rain-slicked road, and the sprint championship was decided by two inches on the final sprint in Paris. Personal stories of pain and triumph, with Tyler Hamilton breaking his collarbone on the first stage of the Tour and willing himself not only to continue, but to come in fourth overall.

But what has impressed me the most this year was Lance. Not just Lance-the-Athlete, who excelled at enough different parts of the Tour to win (at one point, Lance was second in the polka-dotted-jersey competition, for mountain climbing, and he ended up fourth), and Lance-the-Organizer, who put together one of the best supporting teams ever in Tour history, but Lance-the-Communicator, who now speaks French well enough that he talks to the French TV coverage at the end of a stage before he talks to English-language TV, and he goes out of his way to talk to the French press (enough so that while he was awarded the "lemon prize" in 2001 by the Tour's press corps as being the least accessible and most unpleasant rider that year, this year they awarded him the "orange prize" as being the nicest and most accessible rider) and Lance-the-Person, who views himself as wanting to do things "right" if he's going to do them at all, not because he's a champion or a hero, but because it's what he expects it of himself.

Boy, I'm looking forward to next year's Tour already: to see whether Lance can pull it all together one more time, to become the Tour's first six-time champion, to see the continuing struggle with Jan Ullrich and Joseba Beloki (who we hope recovers to race again), to see the development of Tyler Hamilton. To see whether next year's Tour can top the standard set this year. Until then, I'll just have to be satisfied with watching Breaking Away.