Originally Posted by
alcjphil
Mountain time trial
Yes, I figured it was for a mountain time trial.
But which mountain time trial? There was only TdF mountain time trial when Lance was riding (2004, up l'Alpe d'Huez), and he didn't use clip-ons for that.
I'm guessing this was an early publicity photo of a bike configured as they might use, but they made subsequent changes (like dumping the clip-ons).
Interesting to see that they were shaving grams by using a down tube shift lever, to get down to the UCI weight limit. But nowadays, it's trivial to build a bike that's well below the UCI limit, without doing silly component swaps.