Lescar, France – Ivan Basso couldn’t shake Lance Armstrong in the Pyrenees as he needed to Tuesday. Armstrong’s inevitable seventh consecutive Tour de France victory moved one day closer.
Then again, so did Basso’s status as next year’s favorite.
Yes, the Tour will continue next year even while Armstrong drinks on the beach or tunes Sheryl Crow’s guitars on the road. The expected debate about who will carry his red-hot torch has turned into a coming-out party for one 27-year-old Italian.
Basso doused all café talk in France this month. Tuesday he finished in the peloton with Armstrong on the 112.2-mile stage from Mourenx to Pau, the last mountain race of the Tour. Basso remains in sec- ond, 2:46 behind Armstrong, with only five days left and only Saturday’s time trial as a reasonable place to make up time.
But with a 23-second lead on third-place Mickael Rasmussen, a weak time-trialer, Basso has pretty much locked up the impressive progression from third place a year ago to runner-up this year. With that, his ideal age and the potential tag he earned when he won the best young rider’s white jersey in the 2002 Tour, Basso is already the man to beat in 2006.
“I’m confident,” said Bjarne Riis, Basso’s team director on Denmark-based CSC. “If I’m not confident right now I don’t know what to say. He’s proven it. He has to me. We decided to ride the Giro (di Italia) and do the Tour and he’s still able to be the best man after Armstrong.
“That confirms the future.”
He also has proved it to Johan Bruyneel, the director of Armstrong’s Discovery Channel team.
“Basso,” Bruyneel said, “is definitely the biggest candidate to win it next year.”
Born to a butcher in Gallarate, Italy, a village just west of Lake Como and south of the Italian Alps, Basso didn’t take to cutting meat. It was his neighbor, Claudio Chiappucci, who had the career Basso craved.
Chiappucci finished on the Tour podium three consecutive years from 1990-92 and inspired his little neighbor to get his first bike when he was 5. Basso entered his first race at 6. By the time he was 9, little Ivan had ridden the Stelvio, the famed 15-mile climb to 9,000 feet in the Dolomites.
Seventeen years later, he’s leading the daily attacks on Armstrong. He hasn’t been effective in topping the legendary Texan, but he is sending a message to the rest of the field. Basso has a 3:12 lead on Germany’s Jan Ullrich, the other major contender who is sitting in fourth.
Basso sent another message at the team hotel here Monday.
“I think every year I’m more ready,” Basso said. “When I go to the Giro this year, I had a lot of recognition. I’m ready. I think next year I’ll have more pressure, but I have one more year. More experience.
“I can’t wait.”
The rap on Basso is he’s too nice, a description never made of Armstrong. Basso, married with a small daughter, chats with fans in his hotel, seemingly with a perpetual smile on his face. With a balding pate over big eyes that seem to soak in everything, Basso seems prepared in every way to get over the hump.
The big question is whether he’ll again ride the Giro, a three-week race in May that is often too grueling to bounce back from in time for the Tour. CSC must determine whether the Giro helped him or hurt him.
“This experience improved me for the future,” Basso said. “Now I’m not sure it’s a good idea or not. But for now it’s OK.”
As Chiappucci served as his mentor as a child, Basso has a new mentor on his cusp of greatness: 1990 Glenwood Springs High School grad Bobby Julich. At 33, Julich is a long way from his big night in Paris in 1998 when he finished third in the Tour.
Julich faded in a series of bad team switches, but he has resurfaced as CSC’s spiritual leader, an Obie Wan in Spandex if you will.
The team has signed Basso through 2008, predicting he would emerge as a Tour favorite and knowing that Discovery Channel might be in pursuit. When Julich came aboard a year ago, he sat down with Basso.
“I just saw a lot of similarities between him and I,” said Julich, a bronze-medal winner at the Summer Olympics. “And the biggest one was I knew I could help him with his time-trialing and I knew, especially after he got third in the Tour de France last year, that I had the experience, because I lived through what happens after you get third on the podium.
“All of a sudden everyone wants to come up with these new ideas and better ways of doing things and I just said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to see you trying these new cranks, or trying this or a new bike. Just keep it the way it is.”‘
He has. But some things are changing. Next year, he may change steps on the podium.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
