LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP/Getty Images

Lance Armstrong is battling teammate Alberto Contador for supremacy of Team Astana and possibly the Tour de France.

ANALYSIS

By Bill Strickland

updated 2:47 p.m. ET July 14, 2009

Conventional wisdom — and plenty of experts — will tell you that it's much too early to predict the winner of the 2009 Tour de France. For one thing, the 21-stage, 3,459.5-kilometer race is barely into its second week. For another, the two top contenders — Astana teammates Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong — are separated by just two seconds.

Finally, the four toughest mountain stages are yet to come, including the most highly anticipated: Stage 20, which finishes atop Mont Ventoux and, coming the day before the largely processional stage that marks the Tour's end in Paris, is the last chance for anyone to gain serious time.

Those are three good reasons to declare the race wide open. But they're also exactly why I believe Armstrong will win.

To understand that, first you have get past some red herrings, such as the hubbub about Astana's team dynamics. Without a doubt, the rivalry between Armstrong and Contador is fascinating — and great entertainment for the fans. But when the crux of this Tour comes, I think it's most likely that, despite all the talk of loyalty and honor codes and inspiration, Astana's racers — who are, after all, professionals — will support whichever guy seems more likely to bring them a victory and a bigger paycheck.

In fact, not doing so would be a bad career move: What team is going to hire a guy who helped throw the world's most important race because he didn't like the leader? Even if the team does end up divided, that kind of drama will color the victory without deciding it. Think about the last legendary intra-team rivalry, the 1986 brawl between five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault and his heir apparent Greg LeMond. It was an epic of open animosity that makes Astana look like a Sunday school class, but the strongest man won.

Also, forget about Armstrong's age. It's true that at 37 he'd be the oldest winner ever, but in this sporting era of 41-year-old Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, nobody can definitively claim that Armstrong's performance will deteriorate because of the number of candles on his birthday cake.

And though the seven-time Tour winner's ability to power his pedal strokes with rage seems to be a real phenomenon, once you're in the realm of pop psychology you can make any argument you want. Contador forged his own steely comeback after surviving a brain aneurysm and having his skull cracked open in surgery, so who's to say that Armstrong's anger won't burn itself out against the Spaniard's resilience?

The one thing that really matters is that, with four mountain stages in the final week, this year's Tour especially favors the rider who gains the most strength — mental as well as physical — in the last seven days of racing. That's Armstrong.

He is universally acknowledged to be a rider who physically improves deep into a stage race, and doesn't fall victim to tactical blunders that arise from fatigue. This is true not only of his past Tour wins, which began in 1999 after his comeback from cancer, but of his performance in the Giro d'Italia in May. At the beginning of that three-week stage race, he was dropped from the lead group on every key climb. By Stage 17, he was attacking the lead group (though, still in the process of riding into peak form, he never challenged for the win).

In contrast, Contador has a history of coming into stage races at a peak and losing form.

When he won the 2007 Tour, he was 9 seconds slower than his teammate, Levi Leipheimer, in the final mountain stage. (He also lost 47 seconds to Michael Rasmussen, who was then wearing the yellow jersey but would be withdrawn by his team in relation to allegations that he'd evaded several out-of-competition drug tests.) Two stages later, in the final individual time trial, Contador lost 2:18 to Leipheimer and 1:27 to Cadel Evans, who finished second overall.

In the 2008 Vuelta a Espana — the third of his Grand Tour victories — Contador lost 31 seconds to Leipheimer in the Stage 20 time trial. Many people — including some on the team — believe Leipheimer could have won that Vuelta had he not already agreed to play domestique.