I felt real good going into the race today. I spent this morning taking it easy, checking out the coarse, checking out the bike. I didn't get going until 6:30 p.m., so after that, I got lunch, took a nap and listened to some music. By the time 6;30 rolled around, I was pretty eager to get going.

	Hincapie's teammate Lance Armstrong got off to a strong start with a second-place finish in the first stage.

The last few kilometers were kind of rolling hills with a crosswind, so all in all, it was real difficult for a time trial coarse. I mean, they're always somewhat difficult, but this one was especially hard.

David Millar from the Cofidis team won today's stage with Lance Armstrong finishing second, two seconds behind Millar. Today's kind of race is Millar's specialty, but I don't see him holding up in the front once we head into the mountains.

Lance beat all of the big name Tour contenders -- Alex Zulle, Jan Ullrich by a good 15 seconds -- so we're pretty pleased about that. France's Laurent Jalabert finished third, and Lance beat him by 11 seconds.

U.S. Postal Service teammates Viatcheslav Ekimov and Tyler Hamilton finished seventh and ninth, respectively, so we're happy about where we stand after the first day as a team. I'm sure that Lance would have liked to have won the race, but I think he's still pretty happy with how things went.

Even though the team has received so much more media attention compared to last year, I think we've done a pretty good job focusing on the task at hand by just staying in our hotel and avoiding the hoopla as much as we can. Not until right before the race did we really expose ourselves to the frenzy.

It does feel good that the race has finally started. It felt like we've been mainly just sitting around for five days staying away from the media circus. I think we're in race mode now and we're concentrated on what we have to accomplish.

For more information on George Hincapie, visit his web site at www.hincapie.com/2000tdf.html.