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Levi on the TT: No excuses

By Jason Sumner, VeloNews.com
Published: Jul. 9, 2006

Give Levi Leipheimer credit. Despite suffering a major-league implosion during Saturday’s 52km time trial, the American GC hopeful wasn’t making any excuses Sunday morning at the Tour de France. Leipheimer alluded to both physical and mechanical problems that hampered him on the lead-up and during the TT, but insisted that’s not where the focus belonged.

“It’s just an issue I’ve had the last couple days,” he said, unwilling to elaborate further on his health issue. “But I’m not going to make excuses. I don’t like to see headlines that say this guy was bad because of that. The point is I was bad and it’s over with.”

In this case, “bad” might be an understatement. Coming into the day the Gerolsteiner team leader was on the short list of possible stage winners. But instead of popping a champagne bottle, Leipheimer simply popped, finishing 96th, 6:06 behind stage winner Serhiy Honchar and 5:05 behind fellow GC contender Floyd Landis.

The question now is whether the American’s GC hopes are done. The answer: very likely.

“Obviously, yesterday was a big blow and I’ll have to rethink my strategy,” he said. “But right now I need to focus on recovering and feeling better. Fortunately I have [the rest day on Monday] to do that. But no matter what, I have to be more aggressive. The thing I have to focus on now is just to recover and get back to my normal self and feel good again. That’s not always easy to do in the middle of the Tour de France. But I’ll focus on that. You probably won’t see too much of me in the next couple days.”

As for the mechanical problems, Leipheimer was again vague, only allowing that he’d recently had to replace the seat post on his time-trial bike.

“I was tinkering with the time-trial bike. I haven’t really felt comfortable on it lately,” he explained. “I’ve had some issues with things breaking and we had to fix that. When you have to change a seat post it takes a while to get it back to exactly where it was before. But that wasn’t the problem [on Saturday]. I felt comfortable on the bike. I think my position on the bike was good. That was definitely not the problem.”

Whatever the case there was surely some kind of problem. Among the most shocking sights of the day was watching Christian Vande Velde motor by his fellow American, then disappear off in the distance.

“Christian has been riding really strong, so I was hoping maybe he would win the time trial and I wouldn’t lose that much time,” said Leipheimer about the CSC rider who ended up 30th at 3:14. “But he wasn’t super fast either. It was just a really bad day for me.”

Now Leipheimer can only look forward and hope that when the climbing starts he won’t have to explain what went wrong again.

“I’m looking forward to the mountains,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll feel better and have the chance to attack.”