Armstrong’s longtime mentor and coach, Astana team manager Johan Bruyneel, hates the idea.

“On the radio ban in 2 stages of the TdF?” Bruyneel wrote Thursday on his Twitter page. “I absolutely disagree. What’s the benefit of returning to the prehistory?”

But Bruyneel should be comforted by the team time trial, because his Astana squad has four of the world’s best riders: Armstrong, Contador, Levi Leipheimer of the United States, and Germany’s Andreas Kloeden.

Other innovations include an uphill finish at the moonscape-like Mont Ventoux in the next-to-last stage — an effort to dangle sporting suspense all the way up to the traditional cruise on Paris’ Champs-Elysees for the finish.

Mont Ventoux’s inclusion almost seems tailor-made for Armstrong, who has called it the toughest Tour climb “bar none” — and one he has never won at cycling’s showpiece event.

With Valverde out, the smart money will be on Contador. He sat out last year because Astana was barred from racing because of a doping scandal in 2007. Other pre-race favorites include fellow Spaniard and 2008 Tour winner Carlos Sastre; Cadel Evans of Australia, runner-up both last year and in 2007; and Denis Menchov, a Russian who won the Italian Giro in May.

Other riders with outside shots include Leipheimer, Kloeden, Sastre’s Saxo Bank teammate Frank Schleck and American Christian Vande Velde, the leader of Garmin-Slipstream who crashed out of the Giro with two broken ribs.

And even though he’s 37, and consigned by Bruyneel to be a support rider for Contador at least from the start, Armstrong can never be counted out. He finished a strong 12th in the Giro, and his rivals know that the man once known simply as “The Boss” has an unparalleled ability to dominate minds in the pack.

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