Lance going for number 7 ----

Go Lance Go!

Lance commits to quest for 7th straight victory

PARIS -- Lance Armstrong will be back in the saddle at this year's Tour de France, chasing title No. 7.

The Tour's only six-time winner finally put an end to questions about his plans for 2005, announcing Wednesday on his Discovery Channel team's Web site that he'll try to extend his record streak of consecutive victories in cycling's most prestigious event.

"I am grateful for the opportunity that Discovery Communications has given the team and look forward to achieving my goal of a seventh Tour de France," Armstrong said, according to the team's site.

Until Wednesday, the Texan had left open the possibility that he wouldn't compete in this year's Tour. As recently as last month, Armstrong said: "I'll definitely be in France this summer. It just might not be on the bike."

He has said he's ready to pursue other challenges in racing and wants to try to win other big races. Still, he has dedicated most of his cycling life to the Tour, leaving little room for such Classic races as the Spanish Vuelta, the Paris-Roubaix or Fleche Wallone, which he won in 1996 shortly before being diagnosed with testicular cancer.

His sixth Tour crown last year elevated Armstrong above four five-time champions: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain.

The team Web site said Armstrong will start his 2005 season with the Paris-Nice stage race in March. He will then compete in the Tour of Flanders on April 3, before returning to the United States to defend his title at the Tour de Georgia later that month.

Armstrong told the Web site that he and Johan Bruyneel, his friend and team manager, "will evaluate my fitness later this spring and possibly add some races to the calendar."

"I am excited to get back on the bike and start racing," Armstrong said, "although my condition is far from perfect."

Hmmm. Other racers probably won't give much weight to that last bit.

After all, while the Texan will be nearly 34 when the Tour begins July 2 -- too old, some might think, to win the three-week cycling marathon yet again -- there were plenty of doubters last year, too. And yet Armstrong managed to defeat younger competitors with arguably his most dominant Tour de France performance ever.

"It's good that he is there. The best should be at the Tour," said Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour champion and five-time runner-up who is one of Armstrong's biggest rivals.

Andreas Kloden, last year's runner-up, said: "I always said he would ride. I am glad he's there."

Only time will tell whether Armstrong can get as fired up about winning a seventh Tour as he did to clinch record No. 6. But he already has said that if he did come back, he would aim for nothing but victory. He says he loves the classic race too much to treat it with anything less than the respect it deserves.

And Armstrong showed last year that in the saddle, he can shut out all manner of distractions -- from a court battle over a book that implied he used drugs to all the attention focused on his girlfriend, singer Sheryl Crow -- to focus on winning.

This year's Tour de France route passes through Germany and features 21 stages over 2,222 miles from July 2-24.

The mountaintop finishes are less intense and the time trials shorter this year. Both are disciplines where Armstrong excelled in the past, so the changes may mean he will have fewer opportunities to take huge chunks of time off his rivals.

But some initially thought that the 2004 route also might trip up the champion. Instead, it proved just to his liking.

Armstrong's winning margin over Kloden -- 6 minutes, 19 seconds -- was not his biggest. But his five solo stage wins and a team time trial victory with his squad made it arguably Armstrong's best Tour.

Can seven wins top that?

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They should do an Imax film of him this tour.

The fact that he is riding the tour again with the intense drug testing scrutiny he will be facing makes me think for sure that he is totally clean.