Lance Armstrong Rips up the Tour Prologue as Spartacus Takes the Win

Published: July 4, 2010Posted in: News
Lance Armstrong Rips up the Tour Prologue as Spartacus Takes the Win

Fabian Cancellara wins the prologue with a time of ten minutes flat. Lance Armstrong was anything but flat. Armstrong flew down the course to record a time of 10:22, good enough for fourth. Even though he lost 22 seconds to Cancellara it’s his time against his main rivals that shows how well the Texan did.

Alberto Contador only lost 5 seconds but now knows that Armstrong is in top form and may be his main rival. Worse off were second and fourth in last year’s tour. Andy and Frank Schleck lost 47 and 35 seconds respectively. Other tour contenders lost time to Armstrong including Michael Rogers, Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre, Ivan Basso, Denis Menchov, Bradley Wiggins and Christian Vande Velde.

The only riders that finished ahead of the Team RadioShack captain were Cancellara, Tony Martin and David Millar. All three are specialists in the prologue which make Armstrong’s performance even more impressive. Of course some of the time gains were not much and this is only the start of the tour, but many critics did not think that Armstrong was capable of besting all his rivals this early or even at all.

Armstrong was not the only Team Radioshack rider that performed well with four riders in the top 25. Levi Leipheimer was 8th, Janez Brajkovic 13th and Andreas Klöden finished 17th. That was enough for RadioShack to place first in the team classification.

Next up for the team will be to stay out of trouble until Stage 3. At that point the cobbles may provide fireworks.

Prologue results

By Thomas Mendonsa, staff writer