Ax-3 Domaines, France – When Lance Armstrong descends the 3,500-foot Col du Portet d’Aspet in the Pyrenees in the 15th stage of the Tour de France today, he will ride with heavy lungs on perhaps the hardest stage in Tour history.
He will also ride with a heavy heart.
This marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Fabio Casartelli.
Before Armstrong notched his remarkable string of six straight Tour wins, he was Casartelli’s teammate with U.S.-based Motorola. On July 18, 1995, also in the 15th stage of the Tour, Casartelli came around a dangerously tight turn on Portet d’Aspet.
The gold-medal winner of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics didn’t make the turn. He crashed headfirst into a concrete barrier. He was not wearing a helmet. There remains a famous photograph of Casartelli curled up in the fetal position, blood pouring from his skull.
He was 24. He left behind a wife and newborn baby boy.
“It feels like almost yesterday when we were descending Portet and I saw him there,” Armstrong said. “So obviously we’re going to pass it again, and that’s always a tough moment. We passed it in training just over a month ago.
“It’s always a tough moment.”
When Armstrong travels to Italy, he visits Casartelli’s wife and son. He also visits the grave in Albese, the tiny town near Lake Como where Casartelli was raised.
“I don’t like to announce it,” Armstrong said. “I don’t like having a press conference about it. It’s a private, personal visit between me and him. He was a great guy and wound up leaving a little baby alone and a wife alone, so it’s a tough situation. But I’ll ride with his memory (today), for sure.”
On Monday’s rest day in Pau, Armstrong and some former Motorola teammates will have a private ceremony in Casartelli’s honor. Casartelli’s wife and son will be at the race today.
Armstrong steamed
With six straight Tour wins on his résumé, Armstrong has some clout with Tour management. This year, he’s hot about the number of transfers from one finish to another start. Each year usually has the riders transferring, by plane or car, a distance to skip from one portion of the country to the next.
This year was especially brutal, with a flight from Mulhouse near the German border to Grenoble in the Alps on Monday and a two-hour transfer from Digne-les-Bain to Miramas near the Mediterranean.
“I think it’s been hard on the athletes,” Armstrong said, “especially after (Thursday): three hard days in the Alps and a two-hour transfer in cars after the race. I don’t think that’s acceptable. You can talk about all the things that go on in cycling, and the athletes are treated like that. That’s not cool.”
Footnotes
Saturday’s stage winner, Georg Totschnig, has been around almost as long as Armstrong. Totschnig, 34, turned pro in 1994, two years after Armstrong, and became only the second Austrian to win a Tour stage. … Thomas Voeckler (Bouygues Telcom-France), who held the yellow jersey for 10 days a year ago, stands 130th out of 160 remaining riders, 2 hours and 22 minutes behind.
