The Return of Lance

Because I’m into cycling, and because I have no other known sports interests to chat with people about, everybody asks me what I think about Lance Armstrong coming out of retirement. I’m a little bit torn. Listen, Lance is a legend, and he’s the legend who attracted the kind of media attention that got me and a lot of other people interested in bike racing. He did a huge amount for the sport, and he did a huge amount for cancer — and now that every cause has its own colored bracelet and Lance mostly makes headlines for dating young blondes, that effort probably needs a boost.

And I would like to see him ride under the new testing protocols — I want to believe that he raced clean, but I’ve been fooled before, and with so many of the top riders of his era having been caught cheating, it’s hard to know what to think anymore.

On the other hand, cycling has moved on. Lots of old dopers have retired out (and caused the collapse of entire teams along the way). There are some brilliant, and hopefully clean, young riders out there, and I’ve never seen a more exciting Tour de France than this year’s. If the teams proving their commitment to clean continue to gain sponsors, while the doping teams continue to implode, I think that’s the shakeup that cycling needs. (So do most other pro sports, which are just pretending they don’t have a doping problem. Baseball’s attempts at doping control are ridiculous.) It really seems, even though only a few years have passed, that Lance belongs to another era.

But Lance is a Star. The new riders deserve their day in the sun, and it would be nice if the media could focus on some of them (including Kristen Armstrong, no relation, who has finally been recognized with some commercial endorsements, at least) instead of on Lance — but that’s not how it works. He’s the only cyclist 99% of Americans can name, and therefore his attempted comeback is both a Big Thing Indeed and, like it or not, good for attention to the sport. I think Versus, the only TV channel covering road cycling at all, has presented more races this season than ever before,and Lance Armstrong has always been a profitable name for them to flog. If along the way people notice some of the other bright young Americans like Dave Zabriskie or Christian Van de Velde, and maybe learn to love the sport, that’s good too.

So, it is what it is. He’ll find a team, and then we’ll see how those legs do after a few years off.