Plus ca change as the wheels prepare to spin

ATHLETICS:IN THE 21 years since Nike first told us to "Just Do It", the campaign has extended well beyond track and field. Not only has the likes of Marion Jones been the face of it, but also Mark McGwire and Michael Vick. Unfortunately, the revelations surrounding those three has probably left Nike wishing they "Just Didn't Do It".

Indeed, the new ad airing on US television features Lance Armstrong. No surprise there. In some ways Lance now has a patent on the phrase “Just Do It”, given his extraordinary knack for achieving what he sets out to do – whether that’s surviving cancer, winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times, or aiming, as he is now, to revisit the pinnacle of the sport at the age of 37 years and 10 months.

The ad is motivating. It features Lance tearing around the Texan roads on his bike, interspersed with images of cancer patients in various stages of recovery. “The critics say I’m arrogant,” declares Lance in the voice-over. “A doper. Washed up. A fraud. That I couldn’t let it go. They can say whatever they want. I’m not back on my bike, for them.” Just Do It!

It’s not the first time Lance has played around with the idea that there’s more to his mission in life than cycling. His bestselling autobiography, after all, was titled It’s Not About the Bike, and has inspired far more cancer patients than cyclists.

It’s just a pity it wasn’t more about the bike. That’s not saying there aren’t plenty of books out there which are all about the bike. Depending on which of them you trust, Lance either represents the supreme sporting comeback or a more sinister opposite.

Only yesterday I was in Waterstones on Dawson Street and found half a shelf of books with yellow covers that seemed fairly convinced he’s the former – such as Lance Armstrong’s War, a mostly laudatory portrait by Daniel Coyle, or Chasing Lance, a no-warts account of his seventh Tour win by Martin Dugard.

Strange thing is, either side of the Lance books was a range of titles that seemed fairly convinced cycling remains riddled with drugs. Such as Bad Blood, a devastating expose by Jeremy Whittle, and also Rough Ride, the original eye-opener by our Paul Kimmage. When first published, in 1990, Kimmage was widely accused of breaking cycling’s oldest code, omerta, the rule of silence – that he was crache dans la soupe, spitting in the soup.

In the new edition of Rough Ride, Kimmage revisits the 2006 Tour to see if anything has changed. He seems to fall for Floyd Landis, the 30-year-old American and former team-mate of Lance, particularly when he loses 10 minutes on the climb to La Toussuire. “The robots are gone,” he writes. “Everyone is suffering. It reminds me of the way the sport used to be.”

Except Landis comes out the next day and regains most of that lost time on the stage into Morzine. He wins the Tour – then three days later is told he’d failed a doping test after Morzine. “Plus ça change . . .” says Kimmage, “plus c’est la même chose.”

One book you won’t find in any bookshop here is LA Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong. Co-written by another of our own David Walsh and former L’Equipe journalist Pierre Ballester, it presents the most damning evidence of all that Lance is not all he’s made himself out to be, albeit largely circumstantial evidence. A bestseller in France, libel laws prevented it from being published elsewhere – although Walsh’s most recent effort, From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France, available on-line, is just as shocking.

That was then, of course. This year, Lance keeps telling us, is different. The only problem is, the Tour has got a little tired of that argument – this year is different. Different to when? Different to last year? Last year Manuel Beltrán tested positive for EPO after the first stage. Then Ricardo Ricci, who won two mountain stages, tested positive for the new brand of EPO. And last October, Tour retesting found positive samples from stage 10 winner Leonardo Piepoli, as well as Stefan Schumacher, who won both time trials, and Bernhard Kohl, third-placed overall and the King of the Mountains.

Different to when? The year before? In 2007, Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for a blood transfusion after winning one of the key time trials, prompting his Astana team to pull out. Next day, Cristian Moreni tested positive for testosterone and his Cofidis team pulled out. The same day, Michael Rasmussen, wearer of the maillot jaune, was kicked out by his Rabobank team for dodging random tests earlier in the summer.

Different to when? The year Lance last won? In 2005, he stood on the podium alongside Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, calling on the sceptics to “believe in these athletes” – then a year later, the day before the Tour, Ullrich and Basso were disqualified for being caught up in Operacion Puerto.

Or different to 1998? The year Festina soigneur Willy Voet was stopped by French customs on route to the Tour start, in Dublin, carrying 234 doses of EPO, 80 flasks of human growth hormone and 160 capsules of testosterone – the use for which he later described in horrifying detail in Breaking the Chain: The True Story of Drugs and Cycling.

In some ways the book which best illustrates why cycling will never be the same again is none of the above, but the loosely autobiographical The Rider by Dutch author Tim Krabbe, published in 1978, and recently recommended to me by Daniel Day-Lewis. The Tour, Krabbe suggests, was changed forever in 1958, the year they first took it to the summit of Mont Ventoux for a stage finish.

Ventoux, at 1,909 metres, is the highest and loneliest peak in Provençal France. Depending on the time of year it can be among the hottest or windiest places on earth. In 1958, Charly Gaul was first in the 21.5km race to the top, then had to be removed by ambulance. Krabbe ominously describes Gaul as the first Rider of the Apocalypse.

Nine years later, in 1967, Tom Simpson rode himself to death on Ventoux, succumbing to the heat and a body full of amphetamines 1.5km from the summit. His story, Put Me Back on My Bike, by William Fotheringham, remained the saddest of all cycling tragedies until, exactly 33 years to the day after his death, stage 10 of the 2000 Tour also finished on top of Ventoux. For Marco Pantani that too was the beginning of the end.

Pantani ended up in a race to the top with Armstrong, who had somehow bridged a gap to the Italian in the early ascent out of Bedoin. Both pushed themselves beyond human limits, creating one of the indelible images of the Tour. Pantani crossed the line first, but they were given the same time. Less than four years later Pantani was found dead in a hotel room in Rimini, having consumed €20,000 worth of cocaine in the last month of his life.

In Matt Rendell’s The Death of Marco Pantani, that Ventoux stage is marked as a turning point. Pantani became paranoid about what drugs other riders may be taking, including Lance. “It isn’t possible,” he said, “that on all these climbs, he rides that much faster, given the effort I make.”

Three weeks from today, after 3,280km, and for only the eighth time, the penultimate stage of the Tour de France will finish on top of Mont Ventoux. Plus ça change . . .