The Malaysian Insider

PARIS, July 28 — Away from the spotlight of the Tour de France and back in Spain, his home country, Alberto Contador took the chance yesterday to say what he really felt about his Astana teammate Lance Armstrong.

“My relationship with Lance is zero,” Contador said at a news conference, one day after winning his second Tour. “He is a great rider and has completed a great race but it is another thing on a personal level, where I have never had great admiration for him and I never will.”

The comments came after three weeks of near silence from Contador about the rivalry with Armstrong, a tense relationship that Contador played down through the race, which ended Sunday in Paris.

At the Tour, Contador and Armstrong, the seven-time Tour winner, fought to be the leader of Astana, the team based in Kazakhstan from which both will depart at the end of this season. Armstrong, 37, will ride for Team RadioShack, a new team based in the United States. Contador, 26, is looking to sign with another team.

The two had become teammates when Armstrong joined Astana after coming out of a three-and-a-half-year retirement in the fall. He and Astana’s team manager, Johan Bruyneel, are close friends and had worked together during Armstrong’s Tour victories.

With two Tour champions on the same team, many wondered how their relationship would play out, particularly when both wanted to win the Tour again. Their interaction provided daily drama at the Tour.

In the end, Contador said, it is good that he and Armstrong are going separate ways.

“On this Tour, the days in the hotel were harder than those on the road,” Contador said. “The situation was tense and delicate because the relationship between myself and Lance extended to the rest of the staff.”

Armstrong finished third, 5 minutes 24 seconds behind Contador, and 1:13 behind the runner-up, Andy Schleck of Luxembourg and the Saxo Bank team. Armstrong’s third-place finish made him the oldest man to make the awards podium at the Tour since the 40-year-old Frenchman Raymond Poulidor did so in 1976.

In the last week of the Tour, Armstrong said he and Contador were never that close, mostly because of the language barrier. (Contador speaks Spanish and Armstrong does not.) They also were unable to get to know each other because they had trained in separate countries and never had that much interaction before the Tour, Armstrong said.

“I probably would have done it differently,” Armstrong said of the way Contador dealt with having Armstrong come to the team this season.

“If I put myself in that position, even in ‘99 or 2000, when I was young and ambitious, if Indurain would have come to the team, he still would have come to the team because he’s Indurain,” he said of the five-time Tour champion Miguel Indurain of Spain. “That doesn’t mean he has to win, but he’s the leader because he’s a legend. Not that I’m a legend.”

Contador said Armstrong would be one of the favorites at the 2010 Tour, and Armstrong said the same of Contador. On the podium together on Sunday, though, they barely interacted.

Then yesterday, around the same time Armstrong flew out of Paris — headed for the Bahamas for a week of rest — Contador was greeted as a hero in Spain.

Fans at the Madrid airport sang the Spanish national anthem again and again, Reuters reported, because Tour officials accidentally played the Danish national anthem for Contador on Sunday.

Contador called the anthem error “an enormous mistake.” — NYT