This is how Lance Armstrong likes it. Riding on the shoulder of an enemy, ready to pounce, keeping him, keeping him guessing guessing. Once it was Marco Pantani and Jan Ullrich. Now the enemy is his own team-mate. And Alberto Contador can be sure that, some time in the next 12 days, the attack from within will come. But he cannot know when or where.
That is one Lance Armstrong: the man who claimed victory in a record seven Tours de France while surrounded by suspicion and innuendo concerning his training methods and his performance, none of it supported by conclusive evidence. This is the arrogant Texan whose exploits, since his days as a junior triathlete, have been fuelled by anger and resentment and are based – in the words of one of his early mentors – on a desire not just to win, but to crush his opponents.
On his comeback to the race with which he is identified, Armstrong is again the focus of attention. As one of his 179 rivals said the other day, "There's one camera on him and one on the rest of us." And while presenting a genial, equable front, he is leaving no doubt that his killer instinct remains active. Whether it remains potent enough to propel a 37-year-old body towards a reprise of the great feats of its earlier incarnation, an apprehensive Castilian is about to discover.
The other Armstrong is the man who came back from radical surgery and radical surgery and debilitating chemotherapy to launch a cancer campaign and who became through his two best-selling books and his public appearances, nothing less than an inspiration to countless fellow sufferers. The total sale of his Livestrong charity's yellow rubber wristbands at a dollar (or a euro) apiece has now reached 75 million, and those who buy them during this year's Tour are assured by Armstrong that the proceeds will go to local cancer organisations.
"That's the difference this year," he said in Tarbes last night. "All the money stays here. I want people to understand that. It's not going back to the USA or to Texas." How could anyone criticise an activist in such an impeccable cause? Even here, however, it is possible for those who dislike the way Armstrong's presence overshadows the race to accuse him of exploiting the Tour's history for his own purposes for his own purposes. The appropriation of the colour yellow, identified for more than a century with the leader's jersey, is debatable, and there are other ways in which the race has become an Armstrong vehicle.
One cherished Tour tradition is the fans' habit of covering the roads with hand-painted exhortations to their heroes. This year four black and yellow Livestrong vans are travelling ahead of the race, selling the wristbands and promoting the charity while neatly stencilling the course, a kilometre at a time, with messages from Armstrong's supporters: "Get a goal and reach further", "Enjoy living not just life", "It's about hope, not the bike". Meanwhile, Armstrong rides on, accepting the applause and the adulation from his old position just behind the front of the peloton, lying third in the general classification, a negligible nine seconds behind Rinaldo Nocentini and two seconds behind Contador, and looking every bit as much in charge as he was in his glory days. When Laurent Fignon, twice a winner of the Tour and now a fellow fighter against cancer, suggested that Armstrong has resumed his former role as the patron of the race, the American demurred.
"My position in the peloton is different," he said. "Perhaps before I ran it with an iron hand. Now it's different. I'm not the sort of boss I was before." He has become adroit, however, at sending out conflicting messages. In almost the same breath as announcing that it is now "war" between him and his team-mate, he explained his lack of response to Contador's surprise attack in Andorra last Friday by saying that he had only been following team orders.
"When Alberto went, there was nothing I could do," he said. "A lot has been made about the team politics but he is my team-mate, and I can't chase him. I can't do anything about following him. That was the case in Andorra." If the same thing were to happen in the mountain-top finish in Verbier on Sunday, or on the Mont Ventoux on the Tour's penultimate day, he added, he would have no choice but to do the same. "I can't break the rules of the team. If he's the best rider in the race, there's nothing I can do. So I try to relax, to keep the atmosphere as calm as I can." He is expecting to grow stronger as the race progresses, as he did in the Giro d'Italia in May, pointing out that he had gone through a month without races between the Giro and the Tour. "I think it's logical that we came into this race a little flat. Not out of shape, but a little... … dull." It takes racing, he added, to recover true form.
For Contador and the rest of the field, the bad news is that Armstrong will not be finished with the Tour when it ends in Paris on 26 July. "Maybe one more," he said yesterday when asked whether this would be his last appearance. And after that he will return with a team of his own, run in partnership with his long-time team director, Johan Bruyneel, supported by Nike and promoting Livestrong, with a main sponsor yet to be identified.
That project, one might imagine, explains why he has become so pally with Mark Cavendish. In assembling the key components of hissquad, Armstrong will require the services of a top sprinter. Cavendish is in awe of the seven-times Tour winner, and proud of the fact that they started exchanging texts a few weeks ago. By the time Team Armstrong, or whatever it turns out to be called, arrives for the start of its first Tour, probably in 2011, Cavendish will be 26 and nearing his prime.
And after a couple of seasons running his own team, what then for Lance Armstrong? The current speculation is that, having spent the last few years being welcomed by heads of state and polishing his public persona, he will run for high political office. This is not a joke. He is a political animal, as his rivals old and new can attest. His public work for cancer and the polishing of his defence against those who accuse him of doping have made him an accomplished performer in front of the cameras and the microphones. He charms world leaders and puts the stiletto into enemies in the peloton with equal efficiency.
If the current US president stuffs up in three or seven years' time, an Armstrong bandwagon may begin to roll. As a sometimes abrasive Texan, and a former cycling buddy of George W Bush, he would seem to fit neatly into the Republican profile. But a personal tendency towards the more liberal end of the political spectrum – he was against the invasion of Iraq – might make him attractive to Democrats in a post-Obama era.
There are battles to be won before his career takes that sort of turn. Bradley Wiggins, who has ridden alongside Armstrong and Contador for the past few days, gave an interesting view of their rivalry yesterday. "I don't think anyone knows what's going to happen between those two," he said. "There could come a point at which they get off the bikes and start fighting each other. It could get as messy as that."
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