Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 11, 1994 TAG: 9405120155
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Mountains Monday, mountains Tuesday, mountains today. It's the Tour DuPont's express-mail misery, back-to-back-to-back.
``To back,'' said Saturn's Scott Mercier.
There are mountains tomorrow, too.
Californian Scott McKinley is definitely not enjoying this. Sitting on the lawn of the Virginia Tech mall after Stage 6 of the bike race - one that yanked riders up four different climbs, including approximately 4,000-foot Mountain Lake - McKinley mused that he may not have made the minimum Stage 6 time limit.
That would have meant no more Tour DuPont. Read: No more mountains. Assured by a teammate he still was in the race, McKinley recalled a lonely moment on Route 460.
``I don't think I wanted to make the time limit today,'' the Coors Light rider said. ``I was holding up like 10 miles of traffic on that highway. They were giving me all these dirty looks. [But] I just wasn't going to pack it in.''
His eyes are on Stage 9, when the course finally flattens out. There was no relief Tuesday, however, for the field that had churned over two tall peaks in the Roanoke Valley time trial on Monday.
Riders took at least 61/2 hours Tuesday to travel 138 miles from Lynchburg to Blacksburg, and the trip included plenty of self-administered thigh-rubs, both during the race and as some riders crossed the finish line.
``It doesn't give you a lot of time to recover,'' said Mercier, who was 12th overall entering Tuesday's stage but rolled in with a group of about 40 riders many minutes behind the Stage 6 leaders. ``The hardest stage is [today]. You have to dig deep.''
Gan's Greg LeMond excavated his championship past and found a gem.
After a feeble time trial in Roanoke Monday that dropped him into 30th place overall, LeMond had said he was ``cooked.'' He certainly wasn't overdone. He was in a lead group of three riders for part of Tuesday's race but was overtaken on Mountain Lake when the pace went from countryside cruising to medium-gear turtle. He finished eighth in the stage to move to 18th overall.
Guys like McKinley and Mercier wound up morose mountaineers. LeMond knew he had to follow Monday's difficult time trial by slinging himself at the leaders on Tuesday.
Never mind that what several riders had called the hardest Tour DuPont time trial was about 24 hours old when Peaks of Otter beckoned - too soon for much of the field, Mercier said.
``I went back to get some water. I didn't think the climb was going to start for another five miles,'' he said. ``Everyone was thinking the same thing: `This isn't the climb.'''
Wishful thinking, maybe. Le-Mond apparently was eager for the rising roads.
``I figured I was so far behind, I needed to get away and win the stage,'' he said. ``After [Monday's] performance, I had to go for it up the hill.''
He did, and the three-time Tour de France champion was voted Tuesday's most aggressive rider by the media.
It wasn't a freebie. LeMond cramped on the descent from Mountain Lake. After passing the finish line, he did a quarter-circuit around Tech's drill field, came back toward the finish line and was cordoned by media. How did he feel?
LeMond exhaled a short burst. ``OK,'' he gasped, then answered what he guessed was the next question - how was the course? - with one word.
``Hard.''
A sentence later, he left with a plea to ``let me rest.''
Tracked down at the awards stand, American bike racing's movie star - a champion with brownish-blond hair and water-blue eyes - analyzed the difference between Monday and Tuesday's races through the Roanoke and New River valleys.
``It was a different type of hill [Tuesday],'' he said. ``Yesterday, we were fresh [but] it was an incredibly hard effort. These hills were hard because there were four or five hills. The pace was up. We didn't go slow today.''
LeMond, invigorated, was smiling. He appeared among the few not overwhelmed by the two days of altitude changes, or drained just thinking about what remains.
``A race like this is just so ... hard in every way,'' McKinley said. ``You can't understand how hard it is.
``For me, the mountain days like today are just survival.''
by CNB