By any stretch of the imagination, the Tour de France is torture by consent. Yesterday, under a broiling sun high in the Pyrenees, there was a frisson of excitement, almost an illusion that a phenomenal champion was in big trouble.

It lasted 45 seconds. It suggested that Lance Armstrong was isolated, maybe broken. And on this breathtaking mountain pass, commentators in an absolute babble of tongues began pronouncing that they were seeing the unravelling of some say the greatest, some argue the most suspicious, cyclist of them all.

“Attack! Attack! Attack!” has been the mantra, led by the sports paper L’Equipe, urging the other 188 riders to take this American before he retires with seven straight Tour wins.

The French, in particular, have wanted this, and have urged specific riders stage by stage to strike when he appears weary. The Pyrenees, where he was weakened by dehydration two years ago and exposed by the German Jan Ullrich, seemed the ideal place.

Yesterday, shortly after 3pm, the pink-shirted T-Mobile team supporting Ullrich made their move. Suddenly, on the ferocious 15km incline that rises remorselessly through 2,000m, they injected the pace that melted the resolve of Armstrong’s Discovery Channel riders. Even the man in the yellow jersey did seem shocked and eclipsed. It wasn’t only T-Mobile. Ivan Basso, the young Italian who may be Armstrong’s heir apparent, seemed in on the pact. Mickael Rasmussen, the lean, brave Dane was on the pace. Floyd Landis, an American but no teammate of Armstrong, went with the break. But — and here was the illusion — Armstrong looked behind him, saw that for the second time in a week his colleagues were not responsive enough, and then, face set in that ghostly mask of concentration, mouth gulping in oxygen, legs turning at a remarkable cadence, he was after them.

We saw on the face of Ullrich, who has dug as deep as any man to try to interrupt the Armstrong era, that they knew at once that the hopes, the rumours, the plots were futile. As the climb continued, as Rasmussen failed to stay with it, as Basso, more than even Ulrlich, showed the spirit to contest the peak of the cruellest climb to the Port de Pailheres, only one human was capable of staging a sprint to the top — Armstrong, of course.

Countless cancer sufferers who have drawn inspiration from this Texan’s incredible fight back from the disease will have cheered. Several ex-champions, and some medical experts involved in professional cycling who say that just what he is doing seems beyond human capability, may have sensed that this quest to beat Armstrong on the road is running out of time.

There is another excruciating day in the Pyrenees today, another 128 miles from Lezat-sur-Leze with a forbidding succession of six climbs, in what Armstrong himself forecast to be the cruellest stage of the Tour. If he wins that, or if none of his wilting rivals beats him by several minutes, the completion of seven Tour wins in seven years will see him home to retirement next weekend Attack! Attack! Attack! is not only what we hear from the French media, and some of the hundreds of thousands who line the roads, it seems to be what comes from inside Armstrong when he is on the bike.

Yesterday, he admitted, it took him to the edge. “Today was hard, I can’t lie,” he said, still gulping for air after the finish. “When it’s this hot, the body doesn’t work well in 34 or 35 degrees — everybody suffers. It’s just a question of how you manage.” How you manage the suffering, did he mean? It’s time to say that Armstrong was not the stage winner of yesterday’s torture, which for the fastest lasted 5hr 43min 43sec. He was second.

The winner, an astounding story in itself, was Georg Totschnig, at 34 nearly a year older than Armstrong. Riding for the comparatively under-resourced Gerolsteiner team, the Austrian came back from a chest infection at the start of the Tour to claim the first stage win of his career.

He was the one rider from a 10-man group of “escapees” who went out in front of the peloton early in the race. Their mission was glory and mountain climb bonuses, and the main cyclists let them go while they concentrated on watching one another.

Only Totschnig had the inner reserves to stay ahead as Armstrong et al overhauled them. The near 10-minute advantage they had worked for was whittled down, the nine were overtaken, but Totschnig will remember to his dotage how he stayed 56sec ahead to the end.

He collapsed to the asphalt, the melting asphalt, not through exhaustion but through emotion. He wept. He phoned his wife and children. He said he had dreamt of this since his 16th birthday, and he did not think about tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, he will possibly pay the price. But Armstrong will be there again, trying to nail the contenders who, as Ullrich says, were “dead-legged” trying to stave him off in the mountains.

The sweat glistening off them all, their cheeks hollowed, their greatest wish to put this man behind them thwarted again, they may have to settle for peddling their own race — behind the yellow jersey.

As if by macabre planning, the route passes the spot at Portet d’Aspet this afternoon where Fabio Casartelli, an early teammate and a friend of Armstrong’s, crashed at 53mph on the descent and suffered fatal head injuries on July 18, 1995.

“You get flashbacks,” Armstrong admitted last week. “I was talking to him five minutes before the race. His wife and son will be here, his parents will be here. It is incredible motivation to me.”

If Armstrong has greater motivation, what chance have the rest?