Richard Bath: 'This collision is the sort of titanic confrontation worth savouring'

CAN YOU remember who won last year's Tour de France? Nope, thought not. The one thing you will probably know for sure is that it wasn't Lance Armstrong, largely because you're almost certainly aware that he retired in 2005 after winning his seventh consecutive tour. The chances are you didn't have a clue that it was Spanish mountain goat Carlos Sastre who pedalled up the Champs Elysee wearing the famous yellow jersey last July.

For all the controversy that Armstrong attracts, he has given cycling a prominence that it would otherwise have struggled to gain. Since he started winning in 1999 and the hard questions started being asked, his presence has ensured that the Tour is one of the greatest sporting circuses of the year. His absence diminished interest in the race.

If the 37-year-old's return was always likely to add a frisson to July's event, it wasn't so much because anyone thought he'd enter the race in a chemically-enhanced state. Even those of us who remain sceptical about his wins but extend him the benefit of the doubt have assumed he wouldn't be brazen enough to risk doping this time around. Just to make sure, the authorities have already tested him an incredible 24 times since his comeback in September.

The degree to which Armstrong polarises opinion has never been better demonstrated than by the renewal of hostilities between him and the French. This is a spat that has serious form. For his part, Armstrong hates the country from whose team, Cofidis, he was sacked in 1997 as he fought cancer. The French press and public's palpable lack of respect for his achievements has only served to heighten his dislike of the Tour's hosts.

France returns his hostility in spades. The reasons for this dislike are debatable. It could be because they think he is a drugs cheat, but that would be to ignore the adoration of French drugs cheats such as Richard Virenque. Nor are the French willing to accept that, drugs or no drugs, he is a race-leader par excellence with an uncanny ability to avoid crashes, skills that no amount of drugs could bestow. Just as likely is Gallic pique at the lack of a French challenger, combined with disquiet at his ruthless dispatching of all comers. This is not a nation to take the eclipse of Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil and Miguel Indurain by a Yankee without complaint.

Whatever the case, the friction was always likely to burn someone and the Tour organisers, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), fired the opening shot when they said Armstrong's presence would be "embarrassing". The ASO is the owner of the sports newspaper L'Equipe, which in 2005 claimed that samples given by Armstrong in the 1999 Tour contained EPO. Those results were leaked to L'Equipe in what he saw as a smear attempt. His exoneration by the International Cycling Union (UCI) received scant mention.

Before his recent arrival in Europe, Armstrong claimed that "my comeback wasn't welcomed by a lot of people in France". They would, he implied, stop at nothing to ensure he wasn't able to compete come July. To judge by the row that has broken out this week, it seems he may be right. To recap, Armstrong faces being banned from the Tour by the French anti-doping agency, the AFLD, after they turned up unannounced at Armstrong's rented house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer and demanded samples of his urine, blood and hair (or "air" as Armstrong sneeringly described it).

While Armstrong's manager Johan Bruyneel rang the UCI to confirm the identity of the visitor (testers usually travel in pairs) the cyclist took a shower. Armstrong and the UCI says he did so with the tester's permission; the tester says not. What's not in doubt is that the test went ahead; according to Armstrong the AFLD paperwork stated there were no irregularities.

Whether Armstrong really had misgivings about the "suspicious" doorstepper isn't the point. Nor is the stushie over the shower. Even the UCI's belief that the cyclist wasn't told he had to stay in sight of the tester at all times, as the tester was bound to do, is just mere detail. The main point is that once again details of Armstrong's confidential tests were placed in the public domain by an agency that is supposed to be neutral. Whether it could ever live up to that billing when its boss Pierre Bordry forewarned Armstrong that "he needs to know that he is like everyone else" is debatable. The test may have been negative but the impression left by the AFLD is of a rider with something to hide. No wonder UCI chief Pat McQuaid has publicly censured the organisation, which he said had "not acted very professionally".

Yet despite Armstrong's belief that "this will escalate" and that "there's a high likelihood that (the AFLD will] prohibit me from riding in the Tour", that outcome is not set in stone. What is certain is that in the three months before the Tour gets under way, the mud slinging will intensify, particularly if Armstrong puts in a good show at the Giro D'Italia or even, God forbid, wins it.

It won't be pretty. In one corner is an agency with unlimited powers and a track record of going after the big names. At last year's Tour it busted seven riders, including stage winners. In the other is a man who has proved to be more resilient than any other cyclist in history. This is a man who smashed his collar bone just weeks ago and remains a force of nature who specialises in defying the odds. How else to describe a man whose partner is expecting his child even though he was supposedly left infertile by chemotherapy? How else to sum up the way he finished a charity marathon seconds under three hours when his chances of breaking that self-imposed time limit seemed gone with five miles to go?

It is a sad fact of life for coming riders such as the Isle of Man's Mark Cavendish that the Armstrong circus will lessen the focus on the next generation. But for the rest of us the collision between an obdurate American icon and the opposition of a whole nation is the sort of titanic confrontation worth savouring. We missed Lance when he was away, but now he's back. If the main course lives up to the hype it could be one of the most compelling sporting spectacles of all time.