Yay, Lance? Boo, Lance? Which is it?

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I covered every day of Lance Armstrong’s final three Tour de France victories. It took about five minutes into the first stage of the 2003 Tour for me to realize something. Lance was way better than anyone. He belonged on that bike, he had found his perfect sport. He was smooth. He rode effortlessly. He was the best.

The best athlete, the best rider, the best competitor. He was a winner.

Part of me believes he was enough better that he didn’t need the doping that clearly was rampant in the sport. Part of me thinks Armstrong’s competitive nature wouldn’t allow him not to use whatever advantages others were using. Part of me doesn’t care because if he was using unnatural ways to enhance his talent, so were most of the other top 100 or so finishers in the Tour de France.

It took about two days to realize that Lance wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but so what?

He had competed all his life in Europe, often as the only American on a team, and in a sport where jealousy, backroom gossip and insider conniving are common. Was he paranoid? Maybe a little. He probably should have been.

And whether he was nice or not wasn’t the point. Watching someone so fiercely in need of winning was fascinating. It wasn’t an accident that Armstrong avoided disastrous crashes or draining respiratory illnesses, that he didn’t miss turns or skid in the rain.

He was always better prepared.

So he goes away for three years. He dates starlets (the whole Olsen twin dating, I can’t even remember which one, was a disappointment because Lance is a smart guy), his face has been in every US Magazine/National Enquirer/TMZ tabloid rag around, to the point that he’s become almost a caricature, a 30-something guy who happily abandons the discipline that made him great to become a glorified frat boy.

Now he comes back. He wants to race his bike again. Great, I thought. The sport will be back in the spotlight. I was holding out hope Armstrong might join one of the new American-based teams -- Bob Stapleton’s Team Columbia or Jonathan Vaughters’ Garmin-Chipotle -- two teams committed both to having drug-free squads and shepherding young riders through the years it takes to become top road racers.

And maybe if Armstrong started totally fresh, separating himself from Johan Bruyneel, who, fair or not, will be considered by many to have been part and parcel of whatever underhanded methods Armstrong supposedly used, Armstrong might prove to doubters that he is and always has been a clean rider.

He didn’t. Armstrong is remaining with Bruyneel.

And then I became conflicted. Will Armstrong erase the small good vibes that men like Stapleton and Vaughters brought to cycling last year? Fairly or not, is the Armstrong/Bruyneel partnership forever linked to the disastrous doping age of the last decade?

Armstrong said he wasn’t going to take a salary this year, that he only wanted to raise more money for his cancer foundation, Livestrong, which, whether you believe Armstrong was a clean racer or a doped racer, is a foundation that has done immense good in raising money for cancer research and will always make Armstrong a legitimate hero.

But there were suggestions raised by three people in the cycling world that Armstrong also was asking for more than donations to Livestrong from race directors, that he was asking for appearance fees as well. So well-remembered is Armstrong’s reputation for exacting revenge on those who publicly speak against him that these sources didn’t want to be named.

But that knowledge made me more conflicted about Armstrong’s comeback. Was he just being greedy?

I was conflicted, that is, until yesterday, when Greg LeMond offered up a whiny rage at a Las Vegas cycling convention by haranguing Armstrong and former UCLA drug testing guru Don Catlin with accusations that Catlin, who has been hired by Armstrong to be his personal anti-doping assistant, was signing on only as an enabler who would help Armstrong present a facade of being clean.

Catlin has never proven to be anyone’s dupe. When he ran the UCLA anti-doping lab he worked for the World Anti-Doping Agency, and almost always his testing proved accused athletes guilty of doping.

And since Armstrong has left the peloton there hasn’t been a winner, not a real winner who grabbed the big race by the throat and shook the fight out of everyone. Armstrong will try to do that again. He is, in his competitiveness, so much like Michael Jordan. He is in it to win it and will take on all comers.

If Armstrong can stay healthy while he endures his typical spartan training lifestyle, I predict there won’t be many bigger stories than the Tour de France next summer. And if he stays healthy, Armstrong will win it. He loves to hear the whiners.

-- Diane Pucin