Perpetually under cloud

Cycling : Giving the dope-tainted ones a free run at TDF may just be generating sympathy for Armstrong

In Lance Armstrong's profile photo on Twitter, he is standing, arms crossed, behind a sign that says "PAIN" in big red letters. Never mind that the sign is most likely sitting just outside a French bakery. Armstrong could be using the sign to refer to the pain riders are going through as they ride the 2,088 miles of this year's Tour de France, or he could be using it to point out the pain he is feeling after nearly three years of banishment from all Olympic sports - the consequence of his many years of doping and lying about it.

To me, the sign is emblematic of what Armstrong has become in relation to the Tour de France since he was barred: a giant - say this in bright red letters - pain in the neck.

Armstrong, who in 2012 was stripped of his seven Tour titles, has not competed in the Tour since 2010. But this week he was back on a bike during the race to ride two stages of the event before the peloton rolled through. His appearance was part of a ride for a leukemia charity that was organised by former British soccer star Geoff Thomas.

Chris Froome, the Team Sky rider who is leading the Tour by a wide margin after just over a week, called Armstrong's ride a "nonevent." Which is exactly what it should have been. If the sport truly wanted to move past Armstrong's dirty legacy, it should have ignored him completely.

Let him ride, let him raise some money, and let him go back to Texas. End of story.
But, no, when Armstrong returned to France, it was as if the devil himself had mounted a bike and returned to destroy the entire event, at least according to some people in the sport and some reporters who hinted that Armstrong had a lot of gall to ride the sacred roads of the sport's most prestigious race.

 "I know that Geoff Thomas is very genuine in his charitable work," Brian Cookson, president of the International Cycling Union, told my colleague Ian Austen. "But I continue to believe that Lance Armstrong's involvement in this ride is inappropriate."

After reading his comment, I had to laugh. To say that Armstrong has done things that have been inappropriate would be an understatement. In addition to lying for years as he collected Tour titles, he tried to crush anyone who even suggested that he was a doper: teammates, their families, other riders, reporters, people who used to work for his team.

But his riding in a charity event that is not even a real cycling race would be low on any list of inappropriate things he has done, if it was on that list at all.

Besides, the Tour de France is already weighed down by inappropriate things.
In 2013, the Tour invited all of its past winners to a celebration of the 100th edition of the race. Armstrong was excluded, but among the honorees were admitted dopers like Jan Ullrich (who, only weeks before the Tour get-together, finally owned up to his doping past) and Bjarne Riis, who won the Tour in 1996.

In this year's Tour, two riders in the top 10 - Alejandro Valverde and Alberto Contador - have served two-year doping bans, and the leader, Froome, is riding so well and so easily that he is stirring up the inevitable questions any dominant cyclist faces in the post-Armstrong era.

Armstrong's Twitter take on Froome and his team's performance: "Too strong to be clean? Don't ask me, I have no clue."

Armstrong also pointed out that the Tour's orbit is filled with past dopers, and that while he is seen as a stain that must be removed, their continued presence seems to be just fine.

The most blatant example is Richard Virenque, the former French rider who is a pitchman for Festina, the watch company that is a Tour partner and that used to sponsor a top team. The company's 1998 squad was at the center of a far-reaching doping scandal now called the Festina affair, in which a team car was found to contain a large cache of doping products.

That scandal was so distressing that it spurred the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, but Virenque denied doping again and again - only to admit it two years later during a criminal trial.

In 2010, I saw him step out of a Festina car at the Tour and I had to do a double take. How was the face of the biggest doping scandal in cycling history - at least to that point - earning a paycheck from the very same company whose name he had sullied, and at the very same race whose reputation he had so publicly tarnished?

But that's cycling for you - instead of being shunned, Virenque now has his face plastered on Festina cars at the Tour - and even Armstrong can't figure it out.

"Why am I not welcome? Because I'm a doper?" Armstrong asked reporters before his ride this week. "If you're going to apply a standard, it has to be universal."

He might be right. And how far through the looking glass has cycling spiraled downward when a pariah like Armstrong can be viewed as a sympathetic victim?

But in cycling, where some are barred for life and others ride on with a raised eyebrow, few things seem to be handled with an even hand. Perhaps it's impossible to be straightforward or consistently fair in a sport built on a culture of doping, which began when the Tour began more than 100 years ago.
It can be a pain to stick with a sport like that.