Lance Armstrong has not worn the yellow leader’s jersey for a single day in the Tour de France this year, but spectators have not seemed to care.
On the roads of the course, words of encouragement written in chalk or paint said, “I love Lance!” or “Armstrong is the Best Rider!” A farmer posted a sign near his cornfield declaring, “Armstrong: Why not?”
How things have changed for Armstrong since the last time he competed here, in 2005, when he completed the last of his seven consecutive Tour victories and was seemingly entrenched as the antagonist.
Back then, French fans yelled the word “Doped” as Armstrong rode by. Spectators held fake syringes with his name written on them. Some people spat on him, showing their disgust for the man who has been dogged by doping allegations at this race.
But now, the 37-year-old Armstrong has become a sympathetic figure in the country that once seemed to dislike him the most.
“There was a lot of negative stuff, and very, very aggressive negative stuff — and that’s gone,” Armstrong said last week after one of the Alpine stages of this Tour. “I’m pleasantly surprised.”
Armstrong’s decision to return to racing after a three-and-a-half-year retirement has been a success. Though his chances of an eighth straight Tour victory are all but gone, his reputation here has been salvaged — and then some.
In the past three weeks, he has become an underdog, a rider to be respected — even a friend — to some people in this country who applaud his willingness to come back at his age and put his winning streak on the line.
One French television station on Friday showed him joking with a boy at the race, sticking his tongue out at him. Commentators called him, “Armstrong the kind.”
He is shown on television and in newspapers chatting with his competitors, not shunning them, which is what he admits to doing before. He has been the kind of guy who let the actor Ben Stiller try out his time trial bike, only for Stiller to mount it as if he were mounting a horse. Stiller caused slight damage to the fine-tuned machine, but Armstrong laughed it off.
Surely nobody, including the Tour’s director, Christian Prudhomme, expected Armstrong’s return to turn out this way.
“At first, I was worried and scared because 50 percent of the e-mails I received were against Armstrong coming back and 50 percent of the e-mails were for it,” Prudhomme said Friday at the start of Stage 19 of this 21-stage race. “I didn’t know what would happen.”
Prudhomme said he was instantly calmed when he heard the resounding roar for Armstrong when Armstrong was introduced to the crowd in Monaco before Stage 1.
“Right away, I knew it was the beginning of something different,” Prudhomme said. “He seems to have completely changed from the picture that we knew of him before.”
At this Tour, unlike the others, Armstrong has shown that he is not invincible, and people can relate to that, Prudhomme said.
Armstrong is in third place, 5 minutes 21 seconds behind the leader, his Astana teammate Alberto Contador. He is 50 seconds back from the second-place rider, Andy Schleck of the Saxo Bank team.
And he is barely holding onto a spot on the podium in Paris. After Friday’s stage, won by the British rider Mark Cavendish, Armstrong is 15 seconds ahead of fourth-place Bradley Wiggins of Team Garmin-Slipstream. Awaiting the riders on Saturday is one of the hardest ascents in cycling, Mont Ventoux, where Stage 20 will culminate.
For Armstrong, it has been a long road to the finish. He has shown pain on mountain climbs. He has known the defeat of falling back from the front of the pack.
And for all to see, Armstrong even fell short of securing the role of team leader. Contador, the 2007 Tour champion, earned that status by besting Armstrong in the mountain stages.
“He has lived with suspicion since 1999, and he knows that, I know that, everybody knows that,” Prudhomme said of the doping allegations against Armstrong, who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug once, in 1999, but backed up use of that with a doctor’s note for a saddle sore.
He added: “But now this is the first time we see him suffering. It gives us a sense that he is a human being.”
Even if Armstrong does not win Saturday’s stage or this race, he said his comeback had been worth it.
"It’d be nice, of course, to win something, but to me, there’s been a lot of victories here,” said Armstrong, who is one of the oldest riders here. “And those victories haven’t necessarily been crossing the finish line with hands in the air, and going to the podium and getting flowers and those things. There have been other things that I can take away from this as a victory. I can look to the reason I did it.”
When Armstrong came out of retirement, he said his goal was not only to win an eighth Tour, but to gain attention for his foundation, which promotes cancer awareness. At the race, armies of workers sell his yellow LiveStrong bracelets for about $1.40 each, with all the money raised staying in France.
One of the other reasons for his comeback, he said, was to quell the doubt surrounding his past performances, and the accusations that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. He said his showing at this Tour had answered all the questions.
Not only has he been near the top of the pack, but he has also faced more than four dozen in- and out-of-competition tests since his return last fall, he said, adding, “I think it validates that those performances were pure.”
Still, not everyone in France is cheering his return.
Pierre Ballester, a former writer for the sports daily newspaper L’Équipe, has written three books about Armstrong. His third, “Le Sale Tour,” or “The Dirty Tour,” was published not long before this Tour began.
“To me, the organizers took a risk in having Armstrong at the Tour because Armstrong symbolizes a dark side of the Tour de France and a dark side of the sport,” Ballester said. “For a lot of French people, it was a relief to see him go away. The French public is aware that there is nothing he can do to prove he was clean before. But the public is more or less divided.”
During a warm-up ride for the time trial on Thursday, though, Chris Carmichael — Armstrong’s personal coach — was riding with Armstrong and said they saw only one naysayer among the fans along the roadside. He said a fan yelled, “Doped!” when he and Armstrong rode by.
But there will always be that minority, Carmichael said, no matter what Armstrong does.
The others have been lured in by Armstrong’s story of an older man — and a cancer survivor — trying to win cycling’s most prestigious race, he said.
“That’s not the way it used to be,” Carmichael said. “He’s really enjoying it. When you don’t have people spitting on you or cursing at you when you are racing up Mont Ventoux, that makes you feel pretty good.”
This article, For Armstrong, a Change of Course in a Familiar Race, first appeared in The New York Times.