Cycling: Basso Set for One Knockout Attack

As is customary on the Tour's second rest day, the sports daily L'Equipe asked all the team managers to predict the top three when the race finishes in Paris. Apart from Ivan Basso's manager Bjarne Riis, who does not like such games, they speak with one voice: Lance Armstrong will win.

The collective collapse of the other favourites - Roberto Heras, Tyler Hamilton, Ibán Mayo and, to a lesser extent, Jan Ullrich - means that behind Armstrong there is a new look to the list of candidates for a place in the top three and, just perhaps, overall victory should the great man stumble.

The theme that emerged in the first week of this Tour, when a fresh generation won stages and led the race, has been maintained, with a nuance. Armstrong's three closest rivals - Basso, Spain's Francisco Mancebo and the German Andreas Klöden - are older than some, have all been outside bets to finish in the top three of the Tour in the past but have matured slowly.

Basso and Mancebo are past winners of the best young rider's prize, the Italian in 2002, Mancebo in 2000. Klöden shone in 2000, taking the Paris-Nice "race to the sun", the Tour of the Basque Country and bronze in the Sydney Olympics road race, but he has been anonymous since then.

Basso has made the biggest impression simply because he alone has managed to cling on to Armstrong's wheel in both the Pyrenean mountain finishes, no mean feat in itself. According to Bernard Hinault's former manager Cyrille Guimard, the Texan has to take the Italian seriously. "Armstrong can't afford one false move because Basso has shown that he is as strong as he is," he said. "The slightest weakness on the part of either of them could prove fatal."

Basso bears a famous Italian cycling name but is no relation to the sprinter Marino, world champion in 1972. Apart from winning the world under-23 title in 1998 he has a reputation as a follower rather than a leader. When he left the Fassa Bortolo team last year after finishing seventh in the Tour his then team manager Giancarlo Ferretti dismissed him, saying he would "not pay big money to a rider who never won".

Whereas Ferretti is legendary for a big-stick approach to management, the enigmatic Riis, who won the Tour in 1996, has worked hard to build the confidence of the young man from Lombardy. "I've been there for him, spent time with him, coached him, talked with him. It's all so that he can believe in himself," said the Dane.

Riis travelled with Basso to Boston to improve his time- trial position in a wind tunnel and rode alongside him in training on a scooter equipped with a measuring device that can record a rider's power output. In this way he ensured that his protege did not over- or under-train.

The 26-year-old has also done specific training - which Riis undertook with Tyler Hamilton too last year - to make sure he can hold Armstrong when the Texan suddenly ups the pace on a mountain climb. Last Friday and Saturday it paid off in spades.

"I'm convinced that everything is still possible in the Tour but we can't forget that Lance has won the last five," Basso said yesterday. "If there's a possibility to win the Tour I'll go for it, but you need the legs to attack. It's not as easy as it sounds.

"I've always done things one step at a time and that's what I'm going to do during the rest of the Tour. I've never been as strong in my life and if there's just one chance of winning I'll take it. But I won't attack just to tease Armstrong. If I attack, it'll be to try to land a knockout blow, to win the Tour."

The only rider who has actually attacked Armstrong in this Tour is Mancebo, the latest product of the Navarran stable run by the former professional José Miguel Echávarri, who nurtured Pedro Delgado and most notably Miguel Indurain. Mancebo's move on top of the Col d'Agnes on Saturday was short-lived but it was a rare flash of aggressive intent.

Mancebo, whose personal hero is Delgado, "not Indurain, because he was constantly calculating how much energy to spend", has finished three times in the top 10 of the Tour but has begun to show true winning ambition only this year, taking a tough stage of the Tour of Germany and the Spanish national title. His target is the podium but a stage win would no doubt be dedicated to his late team- mate and friend from his home province of Avila, José María Jiménez, a talented climber who died of cocaine poisoning last year.

Klöden is the dark horse among the three, who has been thrust forward by the poor form of Jan Ullrich. The German said yesterday that he would share team leadership with the 29-year-old, another product of the now defunct East German sports system. "Klödi has been a revelation," said Ullrich. "He was clearly the better man in the Pyrenees, so I've given him carte blanche in the Alps."

All expectations are that tomorrow's time-trial at L'Alpe d'Huez will be the defining moment. But the final 60 miles of today's stage through the Vercors to the ski resort of Villard-de-Lans has barely a level yard in it and in 1987, Stephen Roche's year, this is where the race was decided.