Armstrong may be back but the glory days are gone for everyone

LANCE ARMSTRONG is back in the saddle Down Under, if we can be forgiven for throwing three prepositions into the one sentence.

The man who won the Tour de France seven times is racing in the Tour Down Under in South Australia, and doing pretty well for a man making his return to professional cycling: as of yesterday he was 68th, though he’d also escaped a crash that forced nine other competitors to withdraw from the race.

At one level Armstrong seems already to be a relic of a bygone age — the boom years, long before the advent of such improbable notions as the prospect of Anglo Irish Bank being nationalised, or the value of your house falling in value instead of shooting upwards.

The extent to which Armstrong is a figment of the past can be answered by one simple test: look around you and count off the amount of yellow ‘livestrong’ bracelets you see people wearing. There was a time when they were everywhere, but no longer.

Now the champion cyclist is back, and the impact of his arrival in South Australia has been immediate.

More than half a million people are expected to line the roads for the race, while nearly 7,000 cyclists are expected for Friday’s public ride from Adelaide to Angaston, doubling last year’s turn-out (which was a record in itself).

Hotels are filling up during what is traditionally a quiet part of the year and, according to reports, it’s becoming harder and harder to find a table at restaurants and cafes along the race route.

This dividend wasn’t entirely unexpected — South Australia Premier Mike Rann had said when Armstrong’s participation was confirmed that tourism in the region was expected to benefit — the number of visitors to the state was expected to match the crowds who flocked to Melbourne for the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

A hard-and-fast figure? Rann said he also expected the Texan’s presence to double the AU$17 million (€8m) in economic benefits provided to the state by the last Tour.

ARMSTRONG famously overcame cancer to make a full recovery and win the Tour de France. Equally famously, he has repeatedly denied taking drugs, despite publications such as L’Equipe and Le Monde publishing allegations of same.

That’s not as interesting to us, however, as the fact that even four years after retiring, Armstrong can still draw a crowd, even though by his own admission he’s carrying excess weight and is some way off peak racing fitness.

(Those are relative values, of course; this writer is some way off peak racing fitness as well, but chances are Armstrong can see peak fitness approaching, whereas for us it’s receding into the distance.)

On one hand you could say that it’s an opportunity for Australian sports fans to see one of the biggest names in world sport; Armstrong transcended his particular discipline a long time ago, hence the ‘chance to see Lance’ marketing campaign in South Australia.

For us, though, it’s a little sadder than that. Seeing Armstrong pound the roads is a reminder of a happier time, just a few years ago, when the annual coronation of the American in the yellow jersey of Le Tour was background noise to every summer, and his defeat of cancer was something everybody knew and applauded. Whatever your view of the drug allegations, it was an accepted part of the good years: Lance Armstrong wins yet another Tour.

Now everything has changed, not that you need us to tell you that. Everybody feels as if they’re in the peloton and struggling just to keep up rather than riding out front in splendid isolation.

The return to action of a 38-year-old cyclist just brings all that into sharp focus. It’s all different, and no matter what Lance Armstrong does in Australia — or in France, come the summer — the glory days of just a few years ago are gone for everyone.

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