Lance Armstrong vs The French

There are two Texans that no Frenchman or woman would want to be seen dead in a Parisian ditch with. One of them spent eight years in the White House and the other has seven consecutive Tour de France wins to his credit.

While the first, George W Bush, has slunk back into his hole in the Texan outback, the second, Lance Armstrong, has crawled out of retirement to torment France again. No doubt French blood is boiling from Nantes to Nice.

The nation has never really recovered from Lance’s first Tour win in 1999. You’d look pretty silly too if you organised one of the world’s toughest endurance events around your greatest passion, and a brash young foreigner climbs out of his hospital bed after battling life-threatening cancer and wins the damn thing in a canter.

The French coped by claiming that he was pumped up on banned substances though no tests have been able to prove this.

Lance’s return trips weren’t greeted with raucous cheers befitting a defending champion and hero, but with the French people standing around their countryside yelling Dope as he whizzed past, often in a blur of yellow. Leading newspapers like L’Equipe and Le Monde competed with each other to insult the American.

You’d think Lance would take the hint and stay away. Instead, he kept coming back, he kept winning and he kept pissing off the French by testing negative in every one of the hundreds of drug tests.

In 2004, Lance was dating Sheryl Crow and she followed him like a giddy groupie throughout the tour. Imagine going into a French restaurant with your rock star girlfriend when you know that the waiters are likely to spike your drink and Gallic undercover agents are possibly lurking around the restroom trying to siphon away precious drops of your pee.

Lance hasn’t exactly had a lot of nice things to say about the French either. For example, in 2006, during his speech at the ESPY awards, he remarked about the French world cup soccer team, “All their players tested positive… for being assholes”.

Preparations for Lance’s comeback Tour this year haven’t gone too well. He’s already had a run-in with the French anti-doping agency, calling one of their men ‘suspicious’ and refusing to be tested after a practise session. His favourite bike was stolen and he also broke his collarbone after suffering a nasty crash in one of the warm-up races. It’s highly unlikely that any French tears were shed.

Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s going to put the French off their wine and cheese more than a cancer-surviving Texan winning seven Tours is an ageing, retired, cancer-surviving Texan training with a broken collarbone winning his eighth. I don’t know what the headlines in L’Equipe and Le Monde will say but I suspect the word Dope will feature prominently in them.