I’m depressed now that I can’t watch Lance Armstrong ride every day in the Tour de France. It was truly a great performance, but more off the bike than on. His efforts to rebuild a number of burned bridges were especially laudable.

Lance seems even to have won over Christian Prudhomme, the general director of the Tour, who said recently that the French public embraced him because he suffered on this Tour as never before. He is now a “sportsman” in the grand French tradition. The only person who seems to hate Armstrong (beside his still-vocal legion of detractors) is Alberto Contador, who says he has nothing in common (“zero,” “totally incompatible”) with the American. Unfortunately for Alberto, the flies are now circling around him. Gred LeMond (who suspects everyone of cheating except himself) has implied that Contador’s climb on Verbier was fueled by drugs.

And so it goes. Our emotions make us crazy. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I’m not sure why Greg has to say these things. I suppose he feels he’s making the world a safer, better place. But there’s no need. He came back from a shooting accident and debilitating illness to win the Tour twice after his initial victory in 1987. He put American cycling on the map. LeMond was (and is) a great champion, but the sad fact is that he seems to be the only person who doesn’t know it. Wouldn’t it be easier simply to live and let live, Greg?

I’m sure Lance wanted to ride a better time trial today, but, no matter, he’s still in the thick of it. Unless Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck crack on Mont Ventoux—which seems highly unlikely—this year’s Tour is now a race for third place. It will be fascinating to see whether Armstrong can hold off Bradley Wiggins, Frank Schleck, and his own teammate, Andreas Klöden, on Saturday’s mountaintop finish at Reynard. Certainly, his friend and team director, Johan Bruyneel, will do everything in his power to keep him in third, but will Contador and Klöden cooperate? More importantly, does Lance have the strength to do it?

Sally Jenkins, the co-author of Lance Armstrong’s biography, entertained online questions today for The Washington Post. A questioner from New York City offered the opinion that Lance was an American, a champion, and an insufferable jerk. Sally’s answer was interesting and worth repeating.

“All champions have an insufferable jerk in them. The qualities that enable him to descend a mountainside at 75 mph, or to climb Alps on a bike that car transmissions have a hard time pulling up, are not the qualities that are always great at the dinner table. Champions are curt, focused, self-absorbed, and single-minded. If you encounter Armstrong in the midst of the Tour, he’s not the warmest guy in the world. But if you meet him in September when he is wearing flip flops and drinking a beer, he’s utterly charming. He’s become a good friend of mine as well as co-author, so I am obviously biased. But I’ve had a decade to decide whether he’s a jerk underneath it all, and, to me, he isn’t. He does more work than any athlete I’ve ever known for other people. His work for cancer patients is a hundred percent genuine, and the leading motivator of his life.”

As Sally Jenkins said, she knows Lance well. They’re friends and have co-written two books together. The guy from New York is an outsider looking in (as are most of us). I noticed that a number of other questioners had equally distorted views of Armstrong. But it’s not surprising. This is what we do with celebrities. They assume the role of archetypes in our minds, and we load our emotional baggage on them. The press feeds these distortions, and we defend our stereotypes with all the vehemence of rabble-rousers.

I may be naive, but I trust Sally’s opinion on this one. I choose to believe that although Lance Armstrong is a driven athlete (more driven than is humanly possible for most of us), he is still a good person and a good man.

The English on ITV have stopped repeating the mantra that Lance does not belong in the Tour de France this year. After nine stages, it’s obvious how solid and competitive he is. The French authorities have not changed their tune, however, and have tested Lance for drugs three times in the last forty-eight hours. Of course, they are desperate to prove that his record number of victories in the Tour was drug-fueled. Liggett and Sherwen have called this tactic “silly,” but, of course, it’s part of a larger strategy to disrupt Armstrong’s ability to recuperate after races and break his concentration. There is much to admire about the French, but this kind of pettiness is not one of them.

I’m still processing Contador’s attack at the end of stage 7. Obviously, he had a score to settle, but it goes deeper than that. It was more than pride. I didn’t quite understand this until I heard Bob Roll’s comments on Lance and the team. Roll said that pissing off Armstrong was not a good idea, because he never failed to punish those who did. This much I already knew. More interesting was Roll’s comment that Contador did not have the full backing of the Astana team. Roll implied that if the team were split, the majority of riders would support Armstrong.

The pressure on Alberto Contador must be immense. Not only is he expected to win the race, but he’s got this pesky old man reducing his chances in frustratingly unanticipated ways. It must be like dealing with an aging superhero. Poor Alberto. He keeps shouting, “Where’s the love? Where’s the love?” and no one, except the other Spanish riders, responds.

We are still in for some surprises before this year’s Tour finishes in Paris, I think, but no one can say that Lance Armstrong has not done himself proud.

On the third stage of this year’s Tour de France, Lance Armstrong went with the final breakaway and moved from tenth to third in the classification. Commenting on the race, he said, “I was just trying to stay up front, stay out of trouble, and then it happened. It was good positioning, experience, and a little bit of good luck.” No, Lance. I can say what you cannot. It was sublime. It was genius.

P.S. The Guardian has offered a more prosaic explanation of why Lance took off with Team Columbia. Someone tipped him. Presumably, George Hincapie, Lance’s old buddy. It may be true, but I wonder. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that with Mark Cavendish in their ranks, it’s exactly what Team Columbia would do. Still, as an American, Lance Armstrong could never have the nous to anticipate such a move. George must have whispered it to him on the curve just before the wind split the field.

I’ve been watching ITV’s coverage of the Tour de France with Gary Imlach and Chris Boardman, including race commentary by the incredible duo of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. Imlack, and particularly Boardman, don’t like Lance Armstrong. Their criticisms are many and varied, but seem to revolve around the idea that Lance gets an undue amount of attention and respect for someone who is washed up. The implication is he’s a showboater who has no respect for tradition and doesn’t belong in the race.

As an American, I understand their point of view, but don’t agree with it. Although Armstrong may fail to be on the podium in Paris, and is sometimes rather loose with his mouth (for example, his derogatory comments about Sastre winning last year’s tour), coming back after three years and a broken collarbone and facing the French cycling authorities (who would give anything to prove a drug violation) is one of the gutsiest things I’ve seen a man do.

Lance is about as far from the last great British cyclist, the Scot Robert Millar, as you can get. Millar seldom spoke above a shy whisper and deflected attention whenever possible. Perhaps this is what Boardman would prefer from the seven-time winner of the Tour—a reticence bordering on invisibility.

Although we visited two picturesque towns along the Costa Brava between Barcelona and Girona and had a meal at a Basque restaurant overlooking the river (where both the food and wine were subpar), my lasting impression of the day was seeing the cathedral in Girona, which is approached by climbing eighty-six steps and has a dark, pointed stone vault that is as wide and tall as I’ve seen. The attached cloisters (click on Photos under Meta to the left) were particularly beautiful, and when we emerged from the cathedral, I began to appreciate the charming spaces, narrow streets, and gardens in the old part of the city in a new way. We didn’t see Lance Armstrong, though.