The Tour de France comes to a halt today with a timely rest day in Grenoble before the race moves into the Alps.
After nine days of racing, Lance Armstrong and his team have shown signs of weakness and the six-times Tour champion was forced to relinquish the leader's yellow jersey to Germany's Jens Voigt.
The first big climbs of the Tour are featured in Tuesday's 10th stage between Grenoble and Courchevel and even though Voigt, who is not a climber, is expected to lose top spot, a question mark hangs over the strength of Armstrong's Discovery Channel troops.
The Texan's six Tour victories owed a lot to the perfect assistance of his successive teams and the American cannot afford to find himself completely isolated in the mountains against the likes of the T-Mobile outfit of Jan Ullrich, Alexander Vinokourov and Andreas Kloeden.
Should T-Mobile, Ivan Basso's CSC and other teams with good climbers such as Spain's Illes Balears, Euskaltel and Liberty Seguros join forces to attack Armstrong in the Alps, his bid for an unprecedented seventh Tour victory could be seriously jeopardised.
Discovery Channel looked stronger than ever when they won the team time trial between Tours and Blois on Tuesday but they may have underestimated the difficulty of the weekend's stages and for once did not look invincible.
Armstrong himself asked whether the Vosges climbs, long and regular but not too steep, suited his troops.
The rest day will be a perfect time to examine what went wrong, even though such breaks can be difficult for teams.
"You never know what a rest day does to a rider. Some riders need it badly while others need to keep in the pace and suffer terribly after a rest day," said Ag2R team director Vincent Lavenu.
