Garrett Lai

The whispering had been going on for weeks, in cycling circles. Lance is coming back. But trying ton confirm those rumors had been impossible. Lance wasn’t talking. His friends said they knew nothing. And personally, I didn’t think it was a credible rumor, and neither did any of my friends who are cycling insiders.

Why? Because this isn’t Brett Favre, who “retired” for all of one off-season. This is a Lance who’s been away from professional bike racing for three full years—that’s not a vacation, that’s almost a generation of racers.

Because next July, Armstrong will be 37. (The oldest-ever Tour winner was 36, and this was in 1922, when le Tour was contested at a sleepy pace until the day’s last 20 miles or so, when the race finally got down to business.) For bike racers, the golden years are between your twenty-sixth and thirty-second birthdays. Thirty-seven is on the declining side of the age curve.

Because this late in the year, everyone’s contracts for 2009 have been inked, or are about to be. All the good talent is spoken for, so our hero wouldn’t have a team built to support him, as he did during all seven Tour wins. And as strong as he might have been then, without those teammates he never would’ve made it to the podium.

Because another run at the maillot jaune at this stage of the game isn’t what I’d call a winning proposition.

And Lance Armstrong is a man who does not like to lose.

But here it is, from the man himself in an exclusive interview posted on the Vanity Fair Web site: “I’m going back to professional cycling. I’m going to try and win an eighth Tour de France.”

Holy smoke.

So … how is this going to happen? And who will he ride for?

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It’s impossible to imagine Armstrong making the attempt without Johan Bruyneel, director sportif and strategic architect of each of his wins. (Bruyneel had also dismissed news of a return as just rumors on Monday. And Astana, Bruyneel’s current team, denied any contact with the Texan.) So the smart money is on Astana, for Lance’s team colors. But then Astana has Alberto Contador, who’s notched up a Tour win of his own, and is arguably the strongest stage racer in this year’s field.

Armstrong might have been the strongest rider in the field for those magical years from 1999 to 2005, but nobody wins the Tour de France alone. Every one of those Tour-winning teams was custom built for him, each rider selected for what he might contribute to that yellow-jersey-winning effort. And this late in the 2008 season, everyone with talent has already been spoken for and committed to a team for 2009. The Astana team is built around Contador. How would Lance fit in?

We’ve seen, in the past, that teams with two leaders don’t have the focus to win. T-Mobile tried it with Jan Ullrich and Andreas Kloden, and couldn’t get either of them in yellow. So while adding Lance to the Astana stable might elevate their visibility, it won’t exactly fortify their Tour chances.

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And another thing—Astana wasn’t invited to this year’s Tour. Even with Lance on board, there’s no guarantee this squad would even be allowed to start. And Lance is too smart to hang his helmet on a maybe.

But a possible scenario is that Bruyneel, who's been recruiting riders, takes charge and jumps ship, taking some of his cyclists with him. Add Armstrong to the mix and not only do you have an instant team with Tour-stomping potential, you have a team with marquee power that can attract the one thing no racing team can do without — sponsorship.

New legacy ?According to the Vanity Fair piece, Armstrong has already started training. He’s purchased a home in Aspen, where he can train at altitude. And he’s got something to prove, something to say to his critics who’ve contended that he won because he was the most doped athlete in history.

This time, he’s out to document everything, with a film crew and publicly posted independent test results. As quoted by Vanity Fair, “There’s this perception in cycling that this generation is now the cleanest generation we’ve had in decades, if not forever. And the generation that I raced with was the dirty generation.”

Armstrong doesn’t want that to be his legacy, that he won during the drug era. He wants to be part of cycling’s clean act. “So there is a nice element here where I can come with really a completely comprehensive program and there will be no way to cheat,” he told Vanity Fair.

One helpful factor in his latest quest for another Tour victory: Last year’s race speeds were down, significantly. And while this amounts to just one data point, it’s still something for the positives column. We know he can go this fast. And we know he’s still in good shape: The man took second at this year’s Leadville 100 mountain bike race, a grueling, horrifyingly difficult 100-mile undertaking.

Granted, being in shape for a one-day mountain bike race is not the same thing as stage-racing shape, when you go all out for three weeks straight. But in cycling, a fitness program designed to peak for the Tour starts to get serious right about now, so there’s plenty of time for him to build an engine.

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But there are a lot of wild cards, the biggest being an almost entirely different cast of characters. Everyone who was a major threat to Armstrong has either retired or been drummed out of the sport. There’s a whole generation of strong Tour riders who’ve come into their prime since he retired three years ago. And while Bruyneel—or any active director sportif—is fully aware of the current players and should be able to build a strategy to counter them, that’s not the same thing as Lance having faced these guys down before. Yeah, he’s ridden with them, but that was before they hit their prime. They’re different racers, now.

How he’ll fare against them is a question mark. To do well, Armstrong is going to need a seriously strong team, a cadre of riders as awesome as his Postal Service and Discovery Channel heavies who paced him to victory before.

But can Armstrong build a Tour-winning team this late in the game, when every racer of consequence has either inked a deal for 2009, or is the final stages of negotiation? This is a guy who's used to winning and plays only to win. He's built a team and a program to put him on top before, so it's just a matter of how that remains to be seen this time.

This is not something that’s done lightly. Building a Tour-winning program is like planning an invasion of Normandy-like proportions. My guess is this is something that’s been in motion for weeks, and if that’s the case it ranks as one of the best-kept secrets in sports. It also means we’re going to see more news, especially concerning teams and player transfers.

With a scheduled announcement set for Sept. 24 in New York and the rumors confirmed, it’s a sure thing the next couple of weeks are going to bring more electric news. This promises to be the most interesting, animated transfer season in modern cycling.