BRIEFLY : AMERICAN WITHDRAWS FROM TOUR.

As thunder roared and rain pelted down for another day, Lance Armstrong, the American leader of the Motorola team, decided Friday that an overnight illness had robbed him of his power and that he could not continue in the Tour de France.

``I couldn't breathe,'' the 24-year-old Texan said after his withdrawal near Aix-Les-Bains, France, during the Tour's sixth stage. ``I started feeling a little sick last night. I'm never sick and I didn't tell anyone I was sick. I'm bummed.''

The first hour of the stage, he continued, was easy. ``Then it started going hard and I had no power, I couldn't breathe,'' he said.

Armstrong fell behind the pack just before the second of five climbs over hills in the Jura and the Savoy in eastern France.

He struggled on alone for about 12 miles before he coasted to the side of the road and stopped. An official removed No. 61 pinned on the back of his shorts and Armstrong was out of the race.

Armstrong was not the only man to drop out. Weeklong rains and strong wind have forced the riders to strain in high gears, producing an epidemic of knee injuries, and the slick roads have caused many crashes, reducing the original field of 198 to 169.

Michael Boogerd won by a couple of bicycle lengths and was timed in 5 hours, 5 minutes, 38 seconds, a rapid average of 25 mph.

Second was Erik Zabel, a German with the Telekom team, and third was Laurent Jalabert, a Frenchman with ONCE and a major contender for victory when the Tour ends July 21 in Paris.

Stephane Heulot, a Frenchman with Gan, remained in the yellow jersey of the overall leader, as all the favorites finished in the first main group.

COLLEGE

A federal appeals court in Kansas City, Mo., stepped in at the last minute and stayed an order that was about to start costing the NCAA and its lawyers thousands of dollars a day, attorneys in an antitrust case said.

But it was only a partial victory for the NCAA and its Division I members in the legal battle over their right to set limits on coaches' salaries.

Lawyers for a group of entry level coaches who filed the suit against the NCAA said the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver stayed an order of U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil.

Vratil, in Kansas City, Kan., had set Friday as the deadline for all 305 Division I schools to submit voluminous information regarding coaching salaries and other athletic department expenses to the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs, who won summary judgment in Vratil's court last year, said they needed the information to set damages, which could be tripled and run into millions of dollars. Vratil, angry over the NCAA's lack of cooperation on the matter, said that any school that did not meet the July 5 deadline would immediately incur $100-a-day fines to be paid by the NCAA and its lawyers. Four NCAA lawyers were censured by Vratil in May.

A request by the NCAA to overturn Vratil's order was turned down last week by the 10th Circuit.

Rowing in the worst weather of the day, Princeton's women's intercollegiate championship varsity heavyweight crew exited the Henley Royal Regatta at Henly-on-Thames, England, Friday, losing by 1-1/4 boat-lengths to Cambridge University's boat-race squad.