L'Equipe: It's war!

"The gauntlet has been thrown down," wrote l'Equipe on Wednesday. "Accused in our own pages for having repetitively used EPO during the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong has now chosen to shift the focus of this issue definitively to one of a Franco-American war."

How apt. L'Equipe and France are now the victims. For most of the public, however, this has been a Franco-American issue for a long time, and not due to Armstrong, but to the very paper which now cries wolf.

The proud French have notoriously found Armstrong's complete domination of their race over the last seven years as hard to swallow as a three-course English Sunday lunch (just ask President Chirac how bad a prospect that is!).

"It's a love-hate relationship," Armstrong elucidated on American TV after the accusations of 23 August surfaced. "You know my past with the French media, the Sports minister, the Tour organisers, the laboratories, the judges, the police... It's a real witch-hunt."

For all the hate - and the hate is flagrant each time you flick through the pages of l'Equipe or Le Monde, and each time you listen to the likes of Jean-Marie Leblanc speak evasively into his wobbly dewlaps - there is, or at least was, a little love.

Despite present events, Armstrong has always enjoyed racing and spending time in France; he willingly tries to speak French to the press during the months of July and the French public have frequently been won over by his endearing and often infectious personality.

But that disguises the fact that the French are pained not to have had a winner in their national race since Bernard Hinault's 1985 Indian summer; that Americans have won the race on ten different occasions since and that Armstrong apparently took the excitement and spontaneity out of their fête de juillet.

As Hein Verbruggen, president of the International Cyling Union, announced after the breaking of the latest sham: "I have to say the situation is not pleasant but, for the moment, it only involves Lance Armstrong and France."

It doesn't help either that the naturally cynical and pessimistic French find the American's winning battle against cancer and his triumphant return to the sport as, well, a trifle incroyable.

"For them," Armstrong recently told Larry King on CNN, "my story is too beautiful to be true. One day, a French team-mate of mine told me: 'Listen Lance, the French don't like winners.' "

They must have a pretty high opinion of themselves, then!

"The fact is that cycling in France is in the process of going through one of its toughest periods," explained Armstrong. "They haven't won for twenty years now so naturally it's harder for them to accept."

Granted, the seven-time successive Tour winner has, of late, not exactly heaped on lavish praise towards the French. But to be fair, he has been under an unrelenting barrage of attack from the nation for quite a time now. His frank words are a means of defence, just as is his reported coming out of retirement.

Returning to the sport and racing once again in France would be a cunning, nay ingenious, move for the Texan. Understandably, it has set pulses racing in l'Héxagone. Both Jean-Marie Leblanc and Christian Prudhomme have refused to comment on the matter but are probably sweating under the collar at the potential damage this could do to the race, their own egos and the French nation as a whole. And to think that last July they thought they had seen the back of Armstrong.

Likewise, l'Equipe, who will be bound to follow the race and do so with a modicum of professional integrity, will have to change their stance, or at least call a temporary ceasefire on the simmering war.

For the time being, the sports broadsheet has in fact sunk to childlike whining: "But at the moment of taking his retirement on the Champs Elysées, he promised, spat on his hand and swore that he would not be returning: "My decision is 100% certain," he vouched. But look at him now.

"His image is tarnished. And without a doubt, he thought that the best way to reply "to the sceptics and cynics" was to pedal once again over the roads of France."

The paper seems to make it out that, as well as being the supposed drug cheat they are bent on making him, Armstrong has sunk even lower with this latest show of untrustworthiness. How dare he lie about his retirement, it's really not on, they cry...

And yet it was a different tone when French footballing aces Zinidine Zidane, Claude Makelele and Liliam Thuram came out of the wilderness and announced their return to the sport after equally "100% certain" convictions that there would be no return.

L'Equipe, and the French, naturally welcomed those changes of heart with open arms. Just as they would do - considering the present poor state of their nation's cycling - the unlikely return of Richard Virenque. And what was his infamous claim to fame?

Back to the point, and bear with me for I'm about to tie things up now. If Armstrong is serious about his return to the sport, his motivation to win the race must be more than a desire to "piss off the French". If this was his sole incentive, he faces possible embarrassment if it all goes wrong, especially seeing the lengths at which he went to commit to retirement in the first place.

Yet likewise, l'Equipe will not be able to galvanize their coverage of the event solely around this Armstrong vs us and the rest of the nation pretext, for then it would all sink to the levels of imbecile ridiculosity.

It would nevertheless be pretty entertaining stuff.