Armstrong faces tough test due to new route of Tour de France

Five-time winner Lance Armstrong's bid for a record sixth Tour de France victory will be far from being as usual as organizers announced an extremely unusual race route on Wednesday for this year's race.

After the success of last July's centenary Tour, the organizers have opted for something completely different and the American veteran might have to wait until the very end of the three-week event to make his move.

For the past five years, Armstrong has effectively beaten his rivals in the long individual time trials, the first of which is traditionally held at the end of the first week.

But this time, the first solitary effort of the Tour will take place only four days before the finish in Paris and it will come on the infamous 21 turns of the climb to l'Alpe d'Huez.

The 13.5-kilometer time trial from Bourg d'Oisans to the Tour's most famous summit is expected to be the highlight of the race.

Armstrong's morale could be boosted by the fact that he won the last uphill time trial held on the Tour, in 2001 between Grenoble and Chamrousse.

And before an even more exciting finish, another 56-km individual time trial has been arranged on the penultimate day, around Besancon.

"On the evening at the end of (the 2003) Tour we asked ourselves what we could do to make the next one as exciting," Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc said when he unveiled the route of the July 3-25 event.

"This one should be highly interesting but riders and team managers will have to be good tacticians because upsets will be possible until the very last day," he added.

The strongest teams will not even have a chance to make a decisive move in the traditional time trial held between Cambrai and Arras among the World War One battlefields, as time differences will be limited to two minutes 30 seconds.

Overall, climbers, and especially Spanish and Italian riders, should be favored, even though the big mountain stages look less demanding than in 2003.