Cycling: Armstrong exits on high note

After securing his 7th victory US rider Lance Armstrong's most enduring legacy could be his absence from the Tour. Picture / Reuters

Yesterday, the 155 survivors of the Tour de France rode eight laps of the Champs-Elysees for what was effectively a victory parade, a spectacle purely designed to bring down the curtain with all the panache so beloved of the French.

For one of them, Lance Armstrong, the victory lap has lasted for three weeks. Cynics might add that this Tour, his chosen way of bowing out from one of cycling's most memorable careers, has become little more than a 3600km ego trip.

In fact, rather than Armstrong becoming part of the race's history, so successful has he been that the Tour, the biggest annual sporting event on Earth, has become simply a chapter in the Armstrong story.

In the process, the American with the rock-star girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, has been credited, rightly, for taking the Tour beyond the barriers of sport. Most notably it has been enlisted in the battle against cancer, but has also pricked the interest of multi-nationals such as Nike, as well as straying into the realms of Hollywood and even into the consciousness of the American people, usually scoffed at for their insularity and for whom cycling was previously an obscure European sport.

Hence yesterday, as the riders roared up and down the Champs-Elysees, Paris' central boulevard was awash with Americans, many clutching the best-selling book in the US, The Tour de France for Dummies, under one arm and proudly wearing "Livestrong" yellow charity wristbands - of which 50 million have been sold worldwide - on the other.

Most visible of all were Hollywood players such as Michael Keaton and Matt Damon, royalty in the shape of Prince Albert of Monaco, politicians such as John Kerry, the former Democratic presidential candidate. The wristbands came courtesy of one of Armstrong's paymasters, Nike, who have gone on record as saying that the cyclist is as profitable a commercial venture as any basketball player. Now that's success.

"TV audiences in the States have risen by 30 per cent and people there now say 'Lance' like they'd also say Michael [Jordan], Shaq [O'Neal] or Tiger [Woods]," said Dan Osipow, spokesman for Discovery Channel, Armstrong's team.

But as Armstrong's star has risen, so life on Planet Tour has become monotonous, overshadowed by the monster it has helped create.

Ever since Armstrong took the yellow jersey at Courchevel nearly a fortnight ago, almost every stage has had the same weary formula of a break of riders - of no threat to Armstrong - going unchallenged.

"You see him talking into his race radio when riders attack, saying 'this one yes, this one no, this one's okay, don't let him go'. It's total control," said Joseba Beloki, who has stood on the podium in Paris three times alongside the Texan.

It was symptomatic of the Tour's general malaise that in Armstrong's press conference on Sunday, following his only stage win of the 2005 race (in the time trial at St-Etienne), not one question was asked about the American's actual physical performance that day. Armstrong, it seems, is beyond being queried about his mere athletic capabilities.

An accomplished speaker, Armstrong hesitated only once when asked which of his Tours was the most important. "Ask me in 10 years' time," he countered, before venturing, "the first [1999], the third [2001], and the sixth [2005]". Why? In those three Tours, it turns out he had more axes to grind than in the others.

His 1999 win marked his comeback from cancer, the proof that he had overcome those who said he was finished. At his final press conference six years ago, he said he dedicated 50 per cent of his win to those with cancer, 25 per cent to himself and 25 per cent to those who had not believed in him.

In 2001, where he raced at his most flamboyant, he rode against what he defined as the "cynics and the zealots" - those who dared to raise the issue of doping after he had revealed that he was working with controversial - and later banned - Italian doctor Michele Ferrari.

He responded as he only knows how - by obliterating the field at Alpe D'Huez and Pla D'Adet - and in a memorable rest-day press conference, he told journalists "you're like the weather - if it rains, I wear a raincoat. If not, then not". Hurricane Lance then stormed out of the room and won the race by a country mile.

Last year was his chance to make history by becoming the first to six. There were "no gifts" to other riders; he gobbled up stage wins - three in the Alps, one in the Pyrenees, and the final time trial. The message was plain: don't mess with Texas.

And the aims of No 7? "To go out with my head high and with my children watching me win," he said.

For the Tour de France, the retirement of someone as influential as Armstrong is like losing its centre of gravity. Next year's Tour will be "like an epic without its hero", the French sports newspaper L'Equipe declared recently.

But if the Tour will lose much of its multi-national glamour and after seven years of absolute power, and with the near certainty that he could have won at least one more, that will be perhaps Armstrong's most enduring legacy, a final, unintentional contribution to the sport: his absence.

Tour record

* 7 victories

* 83 days in the yellow jersey

* 22 stage wins

- INDEPENDENT