| | 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 last year. Over the next several weeks, Hincapie will share his Tour de France experience through the eyes of a key member of the defending championship team. He writes this installment from Nantes, France.
At 160k, Stage Three was a relatively short stage. In the beginning, my job was to try and get in the middle of any big breakaways, but that didn't really happen today. So I just kind of hung around Lance.
The wind was not too bad today --it was actually at our backs for most of the race -- so it wasn't a particularly difficult day. But then the last 10k coming into the finish got really hectic. There were a ton of roundabouts.
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Lance Armstrong and the U.S.P.S. team are pleased with their current standing. |
I was riding with Lance when the pileup happened. It happened right next to us, so we had to stop and avoid it and then sprint to get back on track. We didn't really lose that much time, but it was pretty chaotic in there. The last 10k were very dangerous.
The team is happy that we haven't had any misfortunes that have harmed our standing or our outlook on the rest of the race. At this point of the Tour, our team mainly just wants to stay out of trouble. We've been doing that and we're right in it, so it's been a good few stages for us.
I think it's perfect that we are not leading right now. Instead of having to pull all day, we've been hanging back and taking care of Lance and trying to conserve energy. We're very pleased with his current second place standing.
Tom Steels has always been really fast -- he's one of the best sprinters in the world. I heard that he was actually sick with a 101-degree temperature as of Thursday, so him winning these two stages is pretty incredible. It'll be interesting to see how he keeps up.
Tuesday is the Team Trials, which is a totally different kind of race. All nine guys from each team start together at five-minute intervals. The strategy is you pretty much just go as hard as you can. But you have to finish with five guys no matter what, so your team score is only as good as the guy who finishes fifth.
We feel like we can definitely be one of the top teams to finish in the Team Trials. We have a lot of pressure on us to do well, but we've got one of the best teams from top-to-bottom, so we're pretty confident about our chances on Tuesday.
The atmosphere surrounding the race thus far has been pretty relaxed. We all watched the Italy vs. France soccer game on Sunday which was really fun, because a couple of the teams have both French and Italian riders, so they were all going nuts on each other. It was a good game, but France eventually came out on top.
For more information on George Hincapie, visit his web site at www.hincapie.com/2000tdf.html.
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ALSO SEE
Armstrong keeps safe distance in Tour's third stage
Hincapie Diary No. 2
Hincapie Diary No. 1
Hood: Where the race will be won
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