LORIENT : Tour de France riders get to put their feet up on Monday, their first rest day. They'll need it.

Looming ahead are brutal ascents in the Pyrenees, which American Floyd Landis will need to climb strongly to confirm his status as favourite to succeed his former teammate, seven-time winner Lance Armstrong.

Landis is exactly a minute behind overall race leader Serhiy Honchar after nine days of racing in the three-week race. But the Ukrainian may have trouble holding onto the leader's yellow jersey when the roads start heading sharply uphill.

Big questions

As a teammate to Armstrong, who retired last year, Landis showed that he can climb, particularly when he came close to winning the hardest Alpine stage of the 2004 Tour.

But whether Landis, now leader of the Swiss squad Phonak, can truly impose himself on the steep gradients of the Pyrenees and Alps will be one of the big questions of weeks two and three.

``The mountains will tell us more, but so far, it's fine. I have a good team, and so far we've been fortunate — we haven't had any bad incidents.

"Till now, everything's good,'' Landis said on Sunday at the start of stage eight, which he finished safely in the middle of the trailing pack in 37th place.

Honchar finished 100th on Sunday, but also was in that pack — which was 2 minutes, 15 seconds behind stage winner Sylvain Calzati.

French rider Calzati won the stage with a solo effort, giving France reason to celebrate a few hours before its World Cup soccer final against Italy. (Though Calzati, whose father is Italian, confessed he was cheering for Italy).

After the rest day, when sleep, massages and a light ride are in order, the Tour gets going again with a flat and likely fast stage from Bordeaux to Dax in the southwest. Then, on Wednesday, comes the first of two hard climbing days in the Pyrenees.

For riders who fared poorly — and there were many — in the first long time trial of the Tour on Saturday, the mountains could offer a chance to make amends.

Paolo Savoldelli of Armstrong's former Discovery Channel squad, and a two-time winner of the Tour of Italy, is 2:10 — a sizable margin on the Tour — behind Honchar, a time-trial expert who dominated the field in Saturday's stage.

``We are definitely not in the position we want to be,'' said Discovery race manager Johan Bruyneel. ``But a bad day, you have to put it behind as soon as you can and look to the opportunities you have. We actually have a lot of people who have the same interest as us, which means being aggressive, especially in the Pyrenees.''

Honchar, the first rider from Ukraine to wear the yellow jersey, has eight top-10 finishes in the Italian tour and was runner-up in 2004. But while that race has hard climbs, the Tour de France is a level above, with greater pressure and tougher competition.

The trouble for Landis is that Honchar is just one ace in a strong hand held by the German T-Mobile squad, which is surprisingly solid despite the withdrawal of its leader, 1997 Tour winner Jan Ullrich, and another rider because of allegations linking them to a doping ring in Spain.

Standout rides

T-Mobile, thanks to standout rides in the time trial, has four racers in the top six overall. They include Andreas Kloeden, runner-up to Armstrong in 2004. — AP

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