| | By George Hincapie
Special to ABC Sports Online
Greenville, S.C.'s George Hincapie rides for the United States Postal Service team, and played an integral part in Lance Armstrong's victory in the Tour de France in 1999. He is a two-time winner of the World Road Cycling Championship, and was ranked 50th in the world last year. Throughout the Tour de France, Hincapie will share his experience through the eyes of a key member of the defending championship team.
CARPENTRAS, France -- This morning, we had to drive three hours to get to our hotel in this small town near Carpentras, where the 12th stage begins, so that was kind of a pain. We got here around noon and the team had lunch together.
We're staying in a hotel here all by ourselves without any other teams, so it's pretty nice. It's an absolute zoo outside the hotel, however. We went riding after lunch for about two hours, and there were roughly 20 cameramen, five or six motorcycles and three cars following us. Everybody wanted to get a picture of Lance. Trying to ride a bike surrounded by paparazzi is pretty strange.
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George Hincapie (right) and the U.S. Postal team go for a practice run. |
We're a very close-knit team. We all get along really well, especially the five Americans on the team -- we're all good friends. During the Tour, we don't go out or anything because we need our rest, but we'll just kind of hang out and eat together.
We eat food with a ton of calories throughout the Tour because we end up burning seven, eight, nine thousand calories a day. In the morning, we'll generally eat pasta and maybe some cereal. We also have a wide collection of recovery drinks and a bunch of fruit for after the race. We'll have pasta again for dinner, a little meat and a salad.
We're taken very good care of over here. We've got one chiropractor and four massage therapists with us, and everyone takes advantage of that. Each of us get about one hour of massage a day.
I've definitely learned to appreciate the French people and their culture. It's definitely something that you have to get used to as a rider at the Tour because everything's so different from home. But the fans are very appreciative of the sport and the effort that we put forth every day. They've been great.
Thursday's stage is a relatively short stage, but it's very difficult -- it has three major climbs and one really huge mountain. However, I'm not sure if we're going to end up climbing the big mountain because there's some terrible weather going up there right now -- severe winds and even some snow. The race officials are going to decide this evening if we're going to go up it or not.
Find out about George Hincapie's "Tour de Café," a line of specialty-roasted coffees with proceeds benefiting the Lance Armstrong Foundation., on his web site at www.hincapie.com/2000tdf.html.
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