CYCLING/Tour de France: The tabloid France-Soir made it clear yesterday that Lance Armstrong's much-discussed return to La Grande Boucle this week may be lively.

"Welcome in France, Trouduc!" proclaimed its front page, Trouduc being a street-slang reference to Armstrong's joke about France's football team having "all tested positive for being assholes".

With France still under the spell of Zinedine Zidane and co, Armstrong's jest, made as he accepted an award from the cable TV channel ESPN on Sunday, was definitely ill-timed. But it was unclear if Armstrong had in fact returned to the race yesterday. His Discovery Channel team spokesman said he had not, but he was said to be at L'Alpe d'Huez prior to today's stage, which he is expected to follow in the Discovery Channel team car.

That his possible arrival provoked such speculation and, for the French press, controversy, merely underlined Armstrong's ability to dominate the agenda one year after his valedictory speech on the Champs Élysées, in which he lambasted those who harbour sceptical thoughts about the sport's freedom from banned drugs.

It has indeed been a busy 11 months for Armstrong, what with speaking engagements, training for the New York marathon, his advisory work on George W Bush's cancer commission, his three children by the marriage that ended in 2003, and involvement with Discovery that has taken him to the Tour of California and the Giro d'Italia. Additionally, his high-profile romance with the singer Sheryl Crowe ended in February.

He has also been active on the legal front, resolving the various cases left over from his cycling career. Most recently, the fallout continued from allegations in the newspaper L'Équipe last August that the blood-doping agent erythropoietin had been found in some of his urine samples from the 1999 Tour during research in France's main anti-doping laboratory.

Armstrong wrote to the International Olympic Committee in June requesting Dick Pound be removed from his post as head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, for his alleged role in the affair. Pound has rejected an official report's claim he instructed the lab to target Armstrong, and it is unclear what will happen next.

Ironically, in view of that controversy, it is as a proponent of his sport's image that he announced he would turn up at the Tour, as well as in his official role as part-owner of Discovery. "With all that happened before the start (of the 2006 Tour), I feel as if the sport and even the event needs fans and supporters right now," Armstrong said shortly after the expulsion, amid blood-doping allegations, of his old rivals Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich.

Coincidentally, Ullrich yesterday reiterated his innocence: "As in any country subject to the rule of law, the until-proven-guilty standard applies, not only to me, but to every other person too," the former Tour winner said in a statement.

Armstrong's return to the Tour will only add to the intrigue as the race enters its decisive phase. Since Friday's stage win by his former Discovery Channel team-mate Yaroslav Popovych in front of Rabobank's Oscar Freire, there has been speculation that Discovery reached an informal agreement, in return for the stage win, that they might help Rabobank as they try to put Denis Menchov in the yellow jersey.

That merely reflects how tightly balanced the race is going into the triptych of Alpine stages that should sort out the finishing order, beginning with today's finish at the Alpe. It is at least 30 years since the Tour has been so open at this point; five candidates for overall victory separated by two and a half minutes, with only five days' racing before the finish in Paris.

On paper the race is Floyd Landis's to lose. As the field took a pause from hostilities in this appropriately named town, he was 89 seconds behind Oscar Pereiro, to whom he willingly gave up the lead on Saturday to preserve his team-mates' strength.

His assumption is Pereiro will fare no better in the Alps than in the Pyrenees. If the Spaniard falters, Landis has a 61-second lead on Menchov, with Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre and Andreas Kloden between 77 seconds and 2 minutes 29 seconds further back.

But events so far suggest that Landis and the other "heads" are vulnerable to a long-distance attack from such as Christophe Moreau or Popovych.

Until tomorrow evening at La Toussuire all bets are off. And Armstrong's presence will be a reminder how different life was for the race under the iron grip of "le boss". ...