ESPN Cycling

They say that editing is a huge part of good filmmaking, and that has certainly become true of the race-in-review video the Tour de France produces and screens annually before organizers announce next year's route.

This time, the footage that fell to the cutting room floor at the last minute included a couple of stage winners, Riccardo Ricco and Stefan Schumacher, and the climbing specialist who finished in third place, Bernhard Kohl. Ricco and Kohl have confessed to using the new-generation blood-booster CERA, while Schumacher is still professing innocence. Their absence from the festivities Wednesday in Paris was pointedly noted by race director Christian Prudhomme.

Ford: Stage Analysis
The route of the 2009 Tour de France was unveiled Wednesday in Paris. ESPN.com's Bonnie D. Ford weighs in on the race's key stages. Story

Prudhomme also made a passing and complimentary reference to his deposed boss, Patrice Clerc, whose antipathy toward cycling's world governing body recently cost him his job. The feud between that body, the UCI, and the company that owns the Tour is supposedly over, leaving the lingering question of whether the UCI will be as hard-line about trying to ferret out dopers as were the French authorities who controlled the process this year and went to extraordinary lengths to catch Kohl and his ilk.

Another absence went unmentioned by Prudhomme -- that of seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, who stayed away from the pomp and circumstance. The formal explanation had to do with scheduling. Armstrong's annual Ride for the Roses fundraiser takes place this weekend in Austin, Texas, and is the signature event of his cancer-fighting foundation. But as usual whenever Armstrong is concerned, there is a complicated subtext.

When Armstrong dropped the bombshell last month that he was emerging from retirement, winning an eighth Tour was the early centerpiece. That was only natural. For most of the world, the Tour de France is not just a big bike race; it's the only big bike race, ungenerous and perhaps unfair as that may be to the rest of the sport. Armstrong's drive would logically lead him to want to test himself against the best in the event he owned for so long. And if, as he insists, his primary mission is to bring maximum exposure to his cause, the Tour is the right venue for his road show.

Tour officials didn't scatter rose petals in Armstrong's path, but that was to be expected, given their organizational turmoil and institutional ambivalence toward accomplishments they view as footnoted by doping accusations. Then there's the matter of Armstrong's team, Astana, which was denied a start in this past year's Tour. There's no indication that will happen again, but Astana is so loaded with talent -- with or without Armstrong -- that it could siphon some suspense out of the race, which has been wide-open these past three years.

Armstrong's new teammate, 2007 Tour de France winner and defending Tour of Italy and Tour of Spain champion Alberto Contador, was kept in the dark about the machinations and publicly fumed when they were revealed. (He has since said he will stay with the team.)

Meanwhile, Tour of Italy organizers leaped into the breach and issued an enthusiastic invitation for Armstrong to participate in the 100th anniversary edition, which ends May 31, a scant month before its higher-profile counterpart in France begins July 4. Armstrong, who never raced in the Giro because of his single-minded focus on the Tour, wasted no time in accepting, and cast doubt on a Tour start. The Italians gleefully released a canned, self-serving statement in which Armstrong was said to have declared that he might come to Italy to win and make it his "real three-week stage race."

In a separate, direct interview, Armstrong asserted that he was more valuable to the Tour de France commercially than the other way around. "Nobody ever said that I need the Tour'' on this campaign, Armstrong retorted after Jean-Etienne Amaury, the young Amaury Sports Organisation founding family figurehead appointed to replace Clerc, said Armstrong had "embarrassed'' the race. In Paris this week, Astana director Johan Bruyneel, one of few people privy to Armstrong's true thinking, rated the American's chances of starting the Tour at 50-50 and said Contador was out to regain the title.

The Tour of Italy leadership recently elected to pass on what French anti-doping authorities did -- have riders' 2008 urine samples retested for the presence of the newly detectable CERA. Giro officials, in a somewhat tone-deaf statement for these times, maintained there was no need to backtrack even though the disgraced Ricco finished second overall in their race.

UCI chief Pat McQuaid later voiced his opinion that retesting on a massive scale might not be constructive, saying that continually revising results after the fact would made a mockery of the sport. But isn't it the doped athletes -- caught or not -- who have made a mockery of competition? Olympic officials, who have said they are retesting possibly hundreds of samples from the Beijing Games, apparently see things differently.

If Armstrong, who has hired anti-doping science pioneer Don Catlin to design a personal monitoring program for him, is dedicated to the idea of transparency, he might want to ponder the issue. It's not going to go away as new performance-enhancing drugs, hopefully followed closely by new tests, continue to enter the market.

An enormous amount of energy will be expended in the next few months in speculation over Armstrong's Tour plans. Most of it will be wasted energy. First, Armstrong loves to keep people guessing, and in this regard, he may be matched only by Bruyneel. Second, there is no way to know how Armstrong's body will react to a full road-racing schedule. He could blow up at the Tour of California in February and decide to pare down his expectations. He could start the Tour of Italy, abandon it in the middle, and figure France is a must-do. He, or Contador, could get hurt, aborting the competitive tension between them.

It seems implausible that Armstrong will attempt two Grand Tours within three months at age 37 when he opted out of that challenge in his prime. But the first pitch of this long ballgame is still distant. Armstrong -- like many riders -- may not know if he'll race the Tour until June.

As if to emphasize the point, Armstrong released an upbeat, conciliatory statement through Astana late Wednesday.

Armstrong noted that the Tour route includes a stage start in his former European home base of Girona, Spain, and culminates with a prominent climb where he never finished first. "While there has been a fair bit of tension and numerous disagreements with the Tour and its organizers, I am well aware that there is new leadership at ASO and I look forward to upcoming conversations and to a mutually beneficial future together," Armstrong said in the statement. "Whether it's promoting the Livestrong global cancer campaign or making the biggest bike race in the world the gem that it deserves to be, I look forward to next year."

He added that it would be "illogical" to determine who would lead the team at the Tour this far out, and said he is "fully committed to supporting the strongest rider in any race, whether that's me, Alberto Contador, Levi Leipheimer, or Andreas Klöden."

The branded image for the 2009 Tour de France was unveiled along with the route Wednesday. It's an empty yellow jersey, artfully folded to resemble a sharply peaked summit. The artificial landscape is stark, sun-soaked and without even the suggestion of human activity. Maybe it's meant to imply that the race is bigger than any athlete, and the Tour has indeed survived a lot.

Is Armstrong, once a master of the sporting bluff, blowing smoke when he says he can do without the Tour? Are Tour organizers equally guilty of posturing by implying they don't need him? In trying to envision the way Armstrong's charge up Comeback Mountain could shake out, the central line from a doomed love story keeps coming to mind:

It could be awfully darn hard for these cowboys to quit each other.

Bonnie D. Ford covers tennis and Olympic sports for ESPN.com. She can be reached at bonniedford@aol.com.