Hincapie unplugged

Hincapie: It's not going to be the same without Lance, but we have a great squad that we're sending to the Tour, and we hope that we can have a very successful Tour de France.

Hincapie: I would love to do an even better Tour de France this year. I don't know how I will react being in position not having to work for Lance. I'll be able to save a lot of energy, but also it's a whole new world that I don't know much about, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity to try to win stages and to try and do a high overall placement.

Hincapie: Obviously the time-trials, I look forward to those and I hope that I can climb well this year. I'm trying to work hard on both of those disciplines, and hopefully it pays off at the Tour.

Hincapie: Obviously [sporting director] Johan [Bruyneel] is very enthusiastic about the Tour, and always wants to do well in it. He loves this race. What we've done with Lance has been a very special thing, and now this is a new era and we look forward to hopefully having more successes. The pressure is still there, but it's like starting over.

Hincapie: I think in principal we'll have more than one leader this year. We always just had Lance and now we have maybe two or three guys that at the start maybe considered the leaders of our team, and I think during the race that will decide who will be the real leader. But the cohesion is great, we all get along really well, and we all have the same goal.

Hincapie: That's a very difficult thing to do and I'm looking forward to sit back and watch that this year, because it's been very hard over the last seven years. I don't know if there's one team that can do that, but maybe they'll be some cohesion amongst teams. But again, it will be nice not to have to do that.

Hincapie: It's going to be a very exciting race. I think a lot of things can happen within even normal flat stages, like you said, a big break-away can get away. And we just hope that if there are opportunities like that then we can take advantage of them and place our riders as best as possible.

Hincapie: There's still so many things that I want to do in cycling. I still want to win some World Cups and I still want to do well at the Tour de France. You know I don't have so many years left, so I want to make the years that I have, the time that I have left in the sport, make it as successful as possible.

Hincapie: Get some racing and fitness back. Maybe I can hopefully win a stage or see how I can do in the mountains, but I don't know. It's been a long time since I raced, six weeks now, I've trained hard and I just hope that I've trained enough to do well in the races.

Hincapie: The Ventoux (Friday's fourth stage) is one of the hardest climbs we do in all of the sport so it's going to be an exciting race up there.

Hincapie: That's easy, me winning last year at Pla-d'Adet. It was kind of a dream come true to win the hardest mountain stage of the Tour. I did it a month before that in training and it was so hard, I almost didn't make it to the top. You know I was on a super day, and it was great for me and my family and all of my friends. At the beginning I just wanted to be in the break-away so I could be there for Lance. But once I made the break-away I was confident I could win.