So close to the end of what could have been another triumphant day in the Tour de France, young Salt Lake City cyclist David Zabriskie very nearly had the yellow jersey of the race leader torn from his back Tuesday as he skidded along the pebbly pavement of this Loire Valley town and came to rest among the steel barricades that lined its gutter.
As it was, Zabriskie and his CSC team lost everything they had worked for all afternoon in the team time trial when the 25-year-old touched wheels with the teammate ahead of him and went down hard with less than a mile to go in the 41.9-mile race against the clock. The shock of seeing the yellow jersey fall and the time it took for the others to regroup cost CSC the stage win as well. With CSC ahead of Discovery Channel by two seconds with less than four miles left, the order of finish was flopped and Discovery reached the finish line two seconds faster than CSC.
Maybe it was a win built on the bad luck of someone else, but Lance Armstrong didn't throw it back. Instead, he slipped into the yellow jersey on the victory podium, zipped it up tight, and raised his arms to the crowd. Local cyclists share brushes with phenom from Salt Lake
By Pete Iorizzo - Journal Sports Writer POCATELLO - Bob Walker noticed it right away. A $6,000 Colnago - "the Cadillac of bikes," Walker said - atop a beat-up Mercury Montego? It seemed out of place.
Out of curiosity, Walker gravitated toward the woman driving the car. She started bragging about her 14-year-old son. "He's going to be a Category 1 rider someday," she said.
The woman, Walker later learned, was the mother of David Zabriskie. Her boasts and the expensive bike were not so out of place, after all. Zabriskie, now 25, wore the ye http://www.journalnet.com/articles/2005/07/06/sports/sports02.txt
|
