Bryan Burwell

Even if his return were fueled simply by an insatiable athletic vanity, it wouldn’t bother me in the very least that Lance Armstrong is coming back to try and conquer the world of cycling once again.

So Armstrong wants to come back and play again?

What else is new?

Like Michael Jordan, Mario Lemieux, Brett Favre, Muhammad Ali and Gordie Howe before him, Armstrong couldn’t stay away. Well isn’t the first basic instinct we learn in sports derived from a Peter Pan-like childhood impulse that we never grow old and the games never end? Wasn’t the most simple pleasure of those childhood games the knowledge that even when the sun went down, the street lights came on and we all scurried home for the evening, that just as soon as the sun came up again we could pick up right where we left off?

So if we can for just a moment get beyond whatever skepticism we might have about the achievements in his previous athletic life, can’t every one of us on some basic level understand why the soon to be 37-year-old cyclist wants to ride again?

Most of the time when these superstars repeatedly come out of retirement, we take it personally, as if they’re doing something to us, as if devaluing the concept of a permanent career withdrawal is eroding society as we know it. Or that somehow if they fail on their return into the fray, that will tarnish the memory of what they once were.

I see it a little differently.

Whenever I see when men like Armstrong or Jordan, Lemieux or Ali come back, I see brilliant athletes in the autumn of their careers who want to exhaust every ounce of their talent before leaving for good. I wish I could have done that. Unfortunately for me — and for the rest of us athletic mortals — we always ran out of talent long before we ran out of desire.

Video   It's all about the bike Sept. 9: The seven-time Tour de France champion announced today that he is coming out of a three-year retirement to race again. NBC's Brian Williams reports. Nightly News

Balky hamstrings, gimpy knees and mediocre athleticism put an end to my competitive sports life 30 years ago. But I still dream. And I envy anyone who can extend his or her athletic lives indefinitely. That’s one of the reasons I became a sports writer.

But Armstrong’s comeback isn’t apparently all about vanity. He says it’s about being on a more public stage to raise money and heightened global awareness of the urgency of discovering a cure for cancer. Last year, in his home state of Texas, he successfully helped campaign to get a state appropriation for $3 billion funding for a local cancer research center.

Even while I always kept an eyebrow raised every time he won a race, I found Armstrong’s passion for waging a personal war against cancer to be one of the most noble acts an athlete ever did with his high-profile stage.

But you can believe there’s another purpose that Armstrong has in mind in this comeback, and it goes beyond the natural desire to keep competing or the nobility of battling cancer.

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Armstrong wants his reputation back, unblemished and unquestioned. He wants to come back to prove that at 37 years old, he can do it clean, that he can prove to his drug-stained sport that all of the skeptics (me included) were wrong about those unproven drug innuendoes that surely tainted many of his greatest past achievements.

He promises that he’ll win another Tour, and he’ll do it under the most intense scrutiny of his life. He’ll make this comeback so crystal clear, so totally transparent to all the doubters that no one will roll an eye, raise and eyebrow or inhale the slightest hint of suspicion about him again.

That’s worthy enough motivation for a return from retirement. Unlike so many of these icons whose images couldn’t be improved by a second act, Armstrong’s legacy can be upgraded by a substantiated drug-free revival tour.

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The cycling world drug cops — particularly the folks at the Tour de France who have chasing after him for years — will not make it easy on Armstrong. They will be waiting for him with a battery of far more stringent drug tests then he experienced in Act I of his career. These beefed up tests have nabbed a ton of crooked drug cheats and slowly pushed the Tour de France out of a cloud of shame and into the bright light of full transparency.

The reputation of cycling, particularly the Tour de France, has been greatly minimized by the stain of performance-enhancing drugs for more than a decade. Whether he likes it or not, Armstrong’s questionable legacy is a part of that shaky and unflattering image.

Can one undisputed victory under this strict inspection outweigh the seven other titles that were done under the heavy cloud of suspicion?

We’re about to find out.

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