Seven-time champion bows out subdued: ‘I’ll remember the bad luck, the crashes.’

Armstrong could never leave well enough alone

Lance Armstrong could never leave well enough alone.

For all his other outsized traits, that restlessness still defines him. It propelled Armstrong to revolutionize a sport, become its greatest champion and a hero to cancer survivors worldwide. That same impulse is what drove him to get back on his bike barely two years ago and risk it all.

Back then, Armstrong was retired with his legacy largely intact, still every bit as powerful and public a figure as he desired. He dated starlets, swapped text messages with Bono, testified before lawmakers and linked arms with Bill Clinton to announce an ambitious global initiative to combat the disease that nearly killed him almost 15 years earlier.

Yet this Sunday saw Armstrong shuffled off to the background at the Tour de France, standing quietly off to one side as the yellow jersey he wore seven years in a row was stretched across the slim shoulders of 27-year-old Spaniard Alberto Contador.

Seeing his one-time teammate and rival atop the podium for the second straight year, and third in the last four, certainly hurt. Armstrong finished third to Contador in 2009, in his first comeback ride after a layoff that stretched back to 2005.

This time around, he was plagued by cobblestones and flat tires, caught up in crashes and no longer a factor even before the midway point of the race. He eventually faded to 23rd, almost 40 minutes behind the winner.

The consolation, noble as it seemed to the rest of us looking on, is that Armstrong, scraped up and sore as any 38-year-old could ever be, didn’t quit.

But being an also-ran was never good enough for Armstrong before. And the sting of this defeat could linger even longer because of a federal investigation launched earlier this year following accusations of doping by Floyd Landis, another former teammate, that one or more of Armstrong’s seven tour titles were achieved by doping.

“In 10 years, when I look back on the 2010 Tour, it won’t be the memory that I have,” Armstrong said earlier Sunday, before the final stage run-in to Paris.

“Obviously, I won’t have a yellow jersey to remember — I’ll remember the team, digging deep to win the team (competition) …. I’ll remember having my son here for a week at the Tour. I’ll remember the bad luck, certainly, the crashes.

“But that,” Armstrong added, referring to Landis’ allegations against him and others, “won’t be the thing that I’ll take away.”

Armstrong has never shied away from attention. He’s perhaps the most frequently tested athlete on the planet and has never come back dirty. But he learned early on that wouldn’t be enough to keep suspicion at bay.

Late in the first of his seven straight wins, in 1999, Armstrong was found to be using a corticosteroid — in a cream for saddle sores, he maintained — and for which he produced a prescription. But Armstrong, as he has every time since, couldn’t resist the chance to fire back.

“They say stress causes cancer. So if you want to avoid cancer, don’t come to the Tour de France and wear the yellow jersey,” he said at the time. “It’s too much stress.”

He never let his guard down after that.

Whether as plaintiff or defendant, Armstrong has won every court case he’s fought since, and pushed back hard against attempts to nail him by French anti-doping authorities, several damaging books and even questions about some of his associates — notably Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, whom he quietly dropped soon after.

As a result of his refusal to back down, Armstrong won the benefit of the doubt and nearly every case he’s contested in the court of public opinion, too. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Armstrong proved to be as tireless and relentless a crusader for cancer research as he was a rider.

Yet the ongoing investigation, trumpeted across the headlines even as he struggled to stay in the race, have put both that record and his legacy in jeopardy. Even Armstrong acknowledged as much.

“Legacies won’t ever be written the same now, like they were before — in this era of 24-7 news and media, and blogs and speculation and the constant need for attention from the media,” he said.

But Armstrong was certain about this much: “If Frank Sinatra lived today, he’d have a much more difficult time being Frank Sinatra.”

Whether that applies to being Lance Armstrong, only time will tell.

But he was already a world-class triathlete at 15, even before cancer and arguably the toughest training regimen ever transformed him into something as close to a machine as humanly possible.

During his run, Armstrong also boasted the most money, best team, support staff and state-of-the-art equipment. He might jet down to train on the moonscapes of Tenerife, up to the tip of L’Alpe d’Huez, or rent a wind tunnel to find out if the material on the back of his jersey bunched up too much — ridges mean more resistance to wind. Those innovations changed cycling forever.

“It was a very traditional sport, very old school, almost relaxed,” he recalled.

“We just wiped it all clean and said, ‘We’re going to analyze every little thing — if it’s the composition of a team, if it’s a diet, if it’s reconn-ing the courses, if it’s the tactics, if it’s radios, whatever it is — we sort of led the push there.”

Yet when Armstrong walked away the first time, in 2005, he was determined not to let even those accomplishments — and the controversies that blew up in the wake of all that winning — to define him. He’s just as determined now.

“There are several camps here: there’s one of ‘he didn’t do anything’; there’s one where ‘he did everything’; and there’s another camp that, ‘he may have done something, but everybody else did something, so I’m OK with it.’ …

“That’s totally fine, I have no problem with that. I gave up fighting that a long time ago,” Armstrong said.

“It’s not going to stop me from running my foundation. It won’t stop me from being a good father to my kids. It won’t stop me from doing whatever I want to do with my life.”