Lance Redux

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I am still geeking out about the start of cross-country season, and the promising performances of my runners. And while they would make great column fodder, I would be remiss if I didn't spend a few hundred words with the gorilla in the room. Lance Armstrong's recent announcement that he's coming out of retirement has been met with equal parts joy and scorn.

His success at Leadville, his part-ownership of the Astana team, and his victory yesterday at the Twelve Hours of Snowmass prove that he has the fitness and means to make it happen. He looks lean again, after a couple years of relative beefiness. And if he can shrug off the burdens of celebrity and a raving addiction to starlets and gossip columns, he might just be able to regain the hyper-focus that defined his racing legacy.

It's all good. For those of you who ridicule Lance for coming back, I say you're out of line. Life is too short to give anything less than your very best, and if a seven-time Tour de France wants to risk his reputation on a comeback, let him. It's not like he's Michael Jordan during the baseball era, picking up a brand new sport just to see if it's a good match. He's doing a Favre, returning to what he loves best because one of these days very soon he will be incapable of such an attempt. I like that he made his announcement the day after Favre made his comeback with the Jets. And I like even more that Vanity Fair's website had the official announcement (with props to VeloNews and Neal Rodgers for having the inside scoop). It's not often that you see the endurance world and the glitz of Vanity Fair commingling.

So the question is why? There's the "you-only-go-around-once" theory, as noted above. There's also the fact that his kids were young when he was winning, and their memories of daddy as champion might be fading, replaced by memories of daddy as playboy. And way back when he retired three years ago, Armstrong was noticeably burned out. The pressure and year-round intrusions into his personal life had made him reclusive and wary.

There are other, less noticeable, reasons. Armstrong has been hounded by innuendo that he doped. Floyd Landis told me as much, although you could chalk those comments up to bitterness. But if Armstrong is to have an untarnished legacy (and this means shutting up Greg LeMond and his accusations about doping once and for all), he needs to win clean. This will mean returning to France, keeping his fingers crossed each day that some French lab tech doesn't make a critical error with his urine sample. Remember, the Tour is not Lance-friendly. Their attitude has always been that they don't need him. And with the 2009 course announcement just weeks away, you can be rather sure they won't slip long time trials or a team time trial in there to play to his strengths.

So Lance has to win clean.

He also has to get Astana into the Tour. Their fondness for dopage in 2007 saw them disinvited in 2008. This meant that defending champ Alberto Contador and podium rider Levi Leipheimer had to settle for dominating the Giro and Vuelta. These grand tours are something special in Europe, but the rest of the world could care less. And that means America, too. On the grand scheme of things, more Americans are probably following the Tour of Missouri than the Vuelta de Espana. So to protect his investment, Armstrong riding one more year makes sense. He's got the juice (no pun or doping euphemism intended) to get Astana back into the Tour. What they do from there is anybody's guess. And, since Lance's claim is that he's coming back to win number eight, he now needs to get busy finding a way to tell Contador that he's going to be a domestique in 2009.

Finally, all those purists out there who say cycling doesn't need Lance are one-hundred percent correct. Cycling is doing just fine without him. It's rebounding from the debacle of the 2007 Tour. But it's a slow process. What Armstrong brings to the table is star power. For lack of a better word, he's sexy. It's been a long time -- oh, three years -- since anyone has equated sexy to cycling. The 2009 Tour de France will be watched by the world, and I for one, plan to be there.

Keep pushing... always.

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