Leaders Keep Pace as Rocky Road Claims Three Victims

CANNES, France - Today marks the end of Bastille Day weekend, a vacation from responsibility for everyone in the hexagone, and that included most of the riders in the Tour de France.

Floyd Landis decided to abandon the duties that come along with his leader's yellow jersey, until he gets back to serious work in the Alps later this week when earning it back will become a priority.The American remains one of the top contenders to the throne in Paris, but defending the shirt this weekend was not part of the Phonak team's game plan.

On Saturday, he did all he could to shed the Tour's equivalent of the boss, jacket and tie - thereby giving his team more options in the mountains - and letting Spain's Oscar Pereiro get away with a previously unheard-of 30-minute lead on a mountain attack. His relaxed response yielded the Spaniard the leadership of the Tour, at least momentarily.

Pereiro finished Saturday with an uncontested escape that earned him the yellow jersey. An unspoken rule of the Tour is that, in exchange, the Spaniard will help Landis in the mountains later this week.

Yesterday, he, Landis, and the Tour's other leaders kept pace along the 180 km through the hot, Provencale hills, finishing just seven seconds behind escapees Salvatore Commesso and Pierrick Fedrigo.

Commesso and Fedrigo escaped early on, along with German standout Matthias Kessler, David Canada, and Rik Verbrugghe until the 141km mark, where the latter two riders ended their bid with a spectacular crash. Vanderbrugghe skidded and lost control of his bike on a dogleg-right turn, launching himself over the edge. Canada, coasting behind him, went down, too, and then Kessler smashed into the guardrail, sending him into an airborne capriole and into the scrub brush. Somehow, the German managed to get back on his bicycle and finish, albeit 12 minutes behind the leader and therefore well out of contention for the title.

In the end, the stage went to Fedri go, from the relatively unknown wildcard team, Bouygues Telecom. He won the sprint with Commesso to the chalk - a day's victory that did little to change the overall results. Landis crossed the line along with the peloton, just 7 seconds behind the sprinters. He stayed in second place overall, 1:27 behind Pereiro (a so-so climber with scant aspirations to the throne in Paris), while the rest of the top five - Russia's Denis Menchov, Australia's Cadel Evans, and Spain's Carlos Sastre - remained less than two and a half minutes behind.

This holiday, it seems, was a time to relax, strategize and reflect on a strange Tour. Pedaling under the hot Southern sun, with the smell of barbecues in the air, it was hard not to yield the overall leadership, or to wax socialistic on the virtues of personal freedom.

"On our team, we have no leader and that's just much better," Didier Rous, of Bouygues Telecom, told French sports daily L'Equipe. "It's so annoying to work for someone all the time."