Tour De France: Heavyweights Unite Behind Ullrich

The announcement last week of Jan Ullrich's team for this year's Tour de France is a telling illustration of the way Lance Armstrong has upped the stakes during his six-year domination of the race.

Alongside Ullrich as he attempts to beat Armstrong for the first time in the five Tours that the pair have ridden head-to-head is one of the strongest teams - and almost certainly the most expensive squad - ever assembled for the race, including no fewer than three possible winners as well as Ullrich.

The conclusion is simple: for the last few years, Armstrong has been so unassailable in the Tour that the only remote hope T-Mobile, or anyone else, have of beating him is by spending their way to success. Since 2003 the Ger man team's policy has been to have several leaders, the idea being that they will wear down Armstrong and his Discovery Channel team by sheer weight of numbers.

Their line-up has never been as strong as this year, however: the Kazakh Alexandre Vinokourov, who finished third in the 2003 Tour, the German Andreas Kloden, last year's Tour runner-up, and the Spaniard Oscar Sevilla would be coveted, cosseted team leaders in other squads; instead, at this year's Tour, they will work for Ullrich 'without a second thought' as Kloden said this week.

Asked to put a figure on the T-Mobile team's budget, and to comment on speculation that it is the biggest professional cycling has ever seen, their media relations man, Luc Eisenga, comes over all coy. 'It could be, it couldn't be. We have a budget which is quite high.' The figure of €8 million (£5.5m) has been suggested.

As Armstrong prepares to pedal off into the sunset with the rock star Sheryl Crow on his crossbar, Ullrich and his other rivals know that the title at stake in this year's Tour is perhaps the most enticing ever: beating Armstrong and ending the most successful run in Tour history is a guarantee of two-wheeled immortality. It would probably be more memorable than a seventh successive victory for the Texan cancer survivor, which would simply be business as usual, even if the business is the toughest sports event in the world.

Nearly all the teams with pretensions to overall victory - and that is perhaps half a dozen of the 21 in the race - are opting for the hydra approach, but without going to the same lengths as T-Mobile. At the Danish CSC team, for example, Ivan Basso is backed up by the American Bobby Julich, a podium finisher in the 1998 race. The Swiss Phonak outfit is headed by Floyd Landis, a former team-mate of Armstrong's, and the Colombian Santiago Botero.

In the unlikely event that the great man has been distracted by his upcoming retirement and a welter of legal cases and proves not to be up to the task, even Armstrong's team have other options in Paolo Savoldelli, recent winner of the Tour of Italy, and the highly rated young Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych.

Armstrong will not rule out a scenario where Vinokourov or Kloden escape early on in the three weeks, marked by one of his two lieutenants, in which event he would turn domestique himself. 'What's important now is that the team wins and I'm willing to share. If something happens in the first week, a group gets 15 minutes and a rider like Popovych is in there I'm not going to get upset. It's a different situation, a different mindset. I've never been in that position.'

For the second successive year, there will be no Britons racing the Tour, as the quadruple Olympic medallist Bradley Wiggins was informed this week that he did not have a place in the Credit Agricole team. The Australians, on the other hand, go from strength to strength each year and two contenders for the green jer sey of best sprinter, in Robbie McEwen and Stuart O'Grady, and three possibilities for a place in the top 10 overall: Michael Rogers, Cadel Evans, and Bradley McGee.

Rogers, a double world time-trial champion, and McGee - prologue time-trial winner in 2003 - will be among the favourites for Saturday's opening stage, a 19km contre la montre from the little town of Fromentine over the bridge that joins the Ile de Noirmoutier to the mainland. Three times as long as the usual prologue, it will offer a chance for relatively substantial margins to be opened up from the off. 'It could be a chance for Jan to strike a blow at Lance from the off,' said Ullrich's team manager Walter Godefroot last week.

Most often in the Armstrong era, however, it has been the great man who has got his uppercut in first, either winning the Tour opener, as in 1999 and 2002, or finishing ahead of the other favourites. The one prologue in which Armstrong has disappointed in six Tours was in 2003, when he was pushed to the limit by Ullrich and Vinokourov.

A similar result on Saturday, with Ullrich finishing ahead of the great man, would cause speculation that Armstrong has not approached his final season with his usual punctiliousness, and - at last - is vulnerable. It is a hypothesis he was keen to kill at source recently when speaking to the website cyclingnews.com.

'Let's not be fooled that me thinking about - or dreaming about - life after cycling is gonna get in the way of what happens during those three weeks in July. I have the dream of winning one more Tour and stopping and that's that. I can focus on the Tour and consider what we're gonna do for the week after the Tour.' That, for the record, is a vacation with Crow and his children. Meanwhile, T-Mobile and the rest will try to ensure that July in France is no holiday for the champion.

Three to watch

Jan Ullrich

The only starter other than Armstrong to have won the Tour, the German needs to better the American once simply so he is not remembered as an also-ran who won the 1997 Tour then subsequently finished second four times in five starts. This spring Ullrich looked sharper and thinner than usual and he has the backing of a super-strong and highly expensive T-Mobile team, which on paper is the match of Armstrong's Discovery men. At 31, this may be his last shot at winning the Tour.

Roberto Heras

The bird-like Spanish climber was highly praised by Armstrong after being hired as his team-mate at his old US Postal Service team and has since been known in those parts as Roberto Who? But Heras has the best three-week stage pedigree of anyone apart from Armstrong, having won the Tour of Spain three times. He is that rare thing, a pure climber who can match the American. But his team, Liberty Seguros, is not strong enough to look after him on the flat stages that precede the mountains.

Floyd Landis

Another ex-Postie who has moved on to lead his own team, this ginger-haired youth from a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania is the leader of the generation of Americans who will be expected to succeed Armstrong. A former top mountain bike racer, the 29-year-old can climb strongly and time trial with the best. But he is untested when it comes to leading a team in a race as long and tough as the Tour. He may bomb, but he could go as well as another ex-Postie, Tyler Hamilton, in the 2003 race.