Whatever you think about him, he is the biggest story in sport this summer. OSM talks to Armstrong’s friends, enemies and rivals about his controversial comeback

1. Why I believe in Lance by John Wilcockson

Virtually everyone I run into is asking me, “Can he do it again?” People want to know whether Lance Armstrong, after an almost four-year absence, can win the world’s greatest bike race an eighth time. I tell them that everything is stacked against him.

At 37 years and 10 months, he is 18 months older than the oldest previous winner, the 1922 champion, Firmin Lambot of Belgium. And Armstrong has not won a single race this year in his return to cycling that began at January’s Tour Down Under. Yet I am confident that he will be a leading contender at the 2009 Tour starting in Monaco on 4 July. I even think he could win.

My opinion is not based on speculation, but on the spirit and must-win attitude that I have observed ever since meeting him two decades ago. It is also based on my interviews with more than 50 people who know him, in writing a book about his life.

His stepfather, Terry Armstrong, told me about the time that a nine-year-old Lance crashed in a BMX race and started crying. His stepdad didn’t sympathise. He picked him up and told him, “We’re finished … If you’re gonna come out here and quit and cry, we’re done … I’m not gonna have a quitter.”

Armstrong’s first professional team trainer, Massimo Testa, an Italian sports doctor, told me a story from the American’s first Tour de France in 1993. Armstrong was only 21 and in his first year as a pro. Experts said he was too young to ride the Tour, and his team director said he would pull the youngster once the Tour entered the mountains.

Armstrong could have left the race early after he became the youngest rider in more than 50 years to win a Tour stage; but he persevered. He got through the first day in the Alps by riding with his English team-mate Sean Yates. He then told Testa: “I want to try one more stage to see how I recover overnight.”

Twenty-four hours later, after an even tougher day of climbing ended with a 16-kilometre haul to the Isola 2000 ski resort, Testa found Armstrong in his hotel room. “Outside it was super-hot,” Testa said, “but he was in bed with two or three sweaters on and a wool hat. He’s under the blanket, and he was shaking. That’s what happens when you’re dehydrated. So I say, ‘Hey, Lance, how do you feel?’ He said: ‘Doing great. Tomorrow, I want to try another.’”

It’s that same indomitable spirit that carried Armstrong though his near-fatal bout with cancer in the autumn of 1996, and gave him the temerity to make his incredible comeback to win the Tour de France in 1999 – and go on to win the race seven times in seven years.

Can he win it again? When Armstrong phoned me last August to tell me he was thinking about coming out of retirement to ride the Tour in 2009, he confided: “I’m doing this for my kids … I don’t want them growing up and reading all these things about me and doping on the web.”

When I asked Armstrong he how he thought he could perform after his extended absence from competition and against riders many years younger than him at this year’s Tour, he said, “I’ll kick their asses.”

I believe him.

• John Wilcockson, the author of a new book, Lance Armstrong: The World’s Greatest Champion, is reporting on the Tour de France for the 41st time in July

2. The story that overshadows the sport by Richard Williams

Many times during the coming month the Tour de France peloton will traverse railway crossings where the warning signs read: Attention! Un train peut cacher un autre! One train, that is, can hide another. In the case of the 2009 Tour, the first train is Lance Armstrong. The other one is the rest of the race. Until he crashes out or gives up or crosses the finish line in Paris on 26 July, Lance’s comeback is the story, for better or worse.

But a million Twitterers can’t be wrong, can they? And those checking out Lance Armstrong’s regular 140-character updates (“At the Aspen Rec Center watching my kids ice skate. They want to know why I’m not ice skating. Got a little thing called the TdeF coming up”) are just a small proportion of the cycling obsessives and cancer survivors following the progress of his comeback.

Week after week, month after month, his face has featured on the covers of the world’s cycling magazines, his progress monitored and analysed for signs of a return to form. It would have been surprising, of course, if the public imagination had not been caught by the idea of the man who came back from cancer surgery to win the Tour seven times in a row returning after a four-year break in an attempt to win it for an eighth time at the age of 37. But this is still a staggering example of how one man’s story can overshadow the greater narrative of an entire international sport.

Armstrong is a familiar figure to people who wouldn’t know Eddy Merckx from Eddie the Eagle but have read the bestselling books in which the Texan recounted the story of his epic battle against a disease that blights the lives of millions. Unlike golf, however, in which the absence of Tiger Woods causes a collapse in viewing figures, cycling has shown no sign of a downturn since Armstrong announced his retirement in 2005, and his return has drawn attention away from competitors involved in new and compelling rivalries.

In a sport desperately trying to shake off its association with performance-enhancing drugs, his reappearance also evokes the era he shared with rivals such as Marco Pantani and Jan Ullrich, Tour winners who were products of the doping culture. Armstrong himself has never given a positive result in a properly conducted test, but his decision to return as part of the Astana team, which has its own history of violations, seemed a curious one, and he went back – on cost and logistical grounds – on a promise to be tested regularly this season by an American scientist.

Young fellows like Mark Cavendish will no doubt welcome their chance to race alongside a legend. But Armstrong’s fame is such that he could have continued to promote his cancer charity – the primary motivation, he claims, for his return – without needing to hog their limelight. His comeback is a great story but, overall, a bad idea.

• Richard Williams is chief sportswriterof the Guardian and will cover this year’s Tour for the Guardian and the Observer

3. What Lance means to cancer survivors by Mike Grisenthwaite

I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in April 2000 and a friend of mine gave me Lance Armstrong’s book It’s Not About The Bike two weeks later. I was 37 and I’d always been used to high levels of fitness – I played rugby for Sale in the mid-90s and, after I retired, I started doing triathlons and marathons. At the time, my wife had just given birth to our first son, so the change was overwhelming. I went from some kind of superman to a cancer victim.

Straightaway, Lance’s book became the text to refer to whenever I was in doubt or in need of inspiration. I always knew that the treatment I was having wouldn’t get rid of the cancer type I had: lymphoma is a gradual process; all the time it’s spreading throughout your body and eventually it destroys your immunity. But I had this gut feeling that if I stayed fit and healthy I would be in a better position to fight whatever came along. Having the example of someone who could go to those depths and get back – not only to ride the Tour de France but win it – was a massive boost. I’m not saying I carried it around under my arm, quoting it verbatim, but that book was the seed for everything I have done since.

By 2005, I was starting to think I might have cracked it, but in February the lumps came back and the whole circus started again. This time the cancer had spread much more – it was really scary stuff. But two amazing things happened: first, my brother was confirmed as a bone marrow donor; and second, I had been warned to expect a relapse in two or three years, but because it had been five, there were new drugs on the market and one in particular, Rituximab, was key. This was a huge thing for me because I believe that the level of fitness I maintained got me to that point – five years, rather than two or three.

In summer 2005, Lance was riding his last – or so we thought – Tour. I got it into my head that I had to go and see him, so a bald, slightly bloated version of me headed down to the Alps with my friend and we watched a couple of stages. I stood on a switchback and, because obviously he wasn’t going flat out, I’m sure Lance clocked me when he went past.

I shouldn’t have been there – I was advised not to go, but it was a bit of a pilgrimage. At that stage, because the bone marrow transplant is very risky, I didn’t know if I was going to survive the next six months. I was on my bike, but I was really struggling; still, I managed to get up all the turns of the Alpe d’Huez twice.

I think a lot about whether Lance might have taken performance-enhancing drugs during his career. Personally, I try to avoid medication as much as possible. You’ve had so many chemicals pumped through your body, why would you risk your health for the sake of a few seconds on the road? The funny thing is that when I was recovering from the transplant I was given the artificial hormone EPO – legally, obviously, because it was designed for people like me who were low in red blood cells. Six weeks after, I did a 300km race in Sweden and completed it in less than 10 hours – my healthy mates were two or three hours behind me.

Just after the relapse, I started Cyclists Fighting Cancer. There are 1,700 new cases of childhood cancer a year, and eventually we want to be able to offer any child under 18 who suffers from cancer a bike to go out on. From my own experience, cycling is the best form of exercise-based rehabilitation you can do.

When I heard that Lance was coming out of retirement I was a bit – I hesitate to use the word – disappointed. I wanted him to leave it where it was; it was the perfect story. Then one morning in May, I woke up to a host of emails. Unbeknown to me, the CFC web guy, Luke, had heard Lance say that he was going to dedicate each stage at the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France to a different cancer story. Luke sent off some details on this amazing young lad called David Poskitt, who is 13 and lost his leg to sarcoma last August, just above the knee. Lance read it out on a video for his site, livestrong.com.

Immediately, we were inundated with offers from people around the world volunteering to help. We are still a bit shell-shocked really, because we are just a little charity surviving on donations. Lance has said that his reason for returning to cycling was to promote the message of cancer survivorship and – although some people are sceptical – he has really proved that is possible. A short video message on his website will make such a difference to kids in the UK who are suffering from the illness.

For me, it was weird because he read out this mission statement I’d written a while back and it was like a completion of the circle. It sounds odd, but I’d read his words in 2000 and now he was reading mine – it meant quite a lot to me.

• Mike Grisenthwaite is the founder of Cyclists Fighting Cancer, cyclistsfc.org.uk

4. Why France does not applaud Armstrong by Pierre Ballaster

The French perception of Lance Armstrong is probably unique. It has to do with history, our history. The Tour de France has been ours for 105 years. At school, in our rural areas, we still teach the geography of our country through the stages of the Tour and every child is one day taken by his father to take part in this collective memory; to see it with his own eyes.

The Tour is Christmas in July. In the 1950s, France followed Bobet and Coppi; in the 70s, Merckx and Poulidor. The heroes grew up with their generations and vice versa. Paris has its Eiffel Tower, France has its Tour; two beacons of heritage that are almost as old as each other.

Then came the Festina affair of the 1998 Tour: cars stuffed full of doping products, police searches, confessions. The charm was ruined, the secrets of modern sport exposed.

Then came Lance Armstrong.

Amid the ruins of a discredited event that was only just being sustained by the illusion of our childhood years, Lance Armstrong suddenly appeared to rule over an imperilled icon. He appropriated – without passion, without sharing – a part of our heritage.

The story had all the ingredients: a cancer survivor become invincible, a lesson in courage. Except the French public had already experienced both the genuinely epic wins of previous times and the trauma of the 1998 Tour. The French, having witnessed first-hand these events on their doorstep, gave voice to their questioning spirit, their suspicion, their opinions.

From now on, will it be a prerequisite to have suffered from cancer in order to enter into the annals of sporting history?

In France, Armstrong’s reputation has been so condemned by books and witness testimonies given under oath that, according to a poll conducted in the autumn, 70% of French people are against his return.

Recently, I took part in a symposium organised by the French parliament on doping. The recurring question among the politicians I encountered was this: how can he still be allowed to compete in the Tour?

The response is simple: because the UCI, the International Cycling Union, does not believe he has any case to answer. The UCI has been unflagging in its support of Lance Armstrong since 1999. And Armstrong’s image has become a strong marketing tool for their sport.

That is why the figure of Armstrong elicits so little sympathy in France. His name has come to signify the opposite of the passion encapsulated by the Tour.

The coureur has therefore returned to the country’s greatest sporting event by a different route. During this last year, he has ensconced his racing comeback in his foundation against cancer. But behind this new humanitarian tendency lurks a strategy, a business, a political ambition (he has confirmed he would like to be governor of Texas in 2014). The French public is not fooled.

• Pierre Ballester is the co-author of 2004′s LA Confidentiel, a bestseller in France never published in the US or in Britain, and the recent Le Sale Tour: Le Systeme Armstrong

5. The view from the Peloton by David Millar

It is very hard for other cyclists to relate to Lance Armstrong. We respect him – there is no doubt about that – because of what he has achieved and how he races his bike. He is clearly one of the greatest bicycle racers in history. But outside of that, it is very hard for us to even fathom what he achieves. It is, even for us, his peers, unfathomable what he does.

Before Lance came along, cycling tended to be dominated by riders like Miguel Indurain: very elegant and classy on the bike, silent and dignified off it, the classic great cycling champion. Often that was because they came from simple backgrounds and weren’t very articulate, or they didn’t have many opportunities to speak. Lance from the start was the super-confident American whose style of racing was very domineering. He rarely gave gifts to riders and would take great of pleasure in crushing whoever he was racing against. Not many of the great champions do that.

I turned pro on a team with him in 1997 when he was coming out of his cancer. He must have been at his weakest then – bald, no eyebrows, nothing – but he still had an air of confidence. He was cocky and brash, the all-American sporting jock. He was almost the Lance Armstrong that he is now in fact, just without all the Tour de France wins.

Our relationship has always been close but it is quite complex. We are very different people. I’ve not got that absolutely deep-down need to win. I enjoy it, I love racing, I love winning, but it doesn’t control my whole life. I guarantee that you have never met anybody like him. He is very good at channelling every single element of his being into doing one thing. I don’t know him well enough to know if that costs him anything else in the rest of his life, but he is as close as you get to somebody who is on another level to most human beings. He doesn’t make mistakes, Lance, ever. If he decides to do something, he ends up doing it.

But he is also complex and paradoxical. He can be very unforgiving, and yet at the same time he can be incredibly kind and empathetic. It’s an odd mix. During the Tour de France, just after I’d been banned, he rang me up to make sure I was OK. I think he’s always treated me as a wayward little brother – we understand each other and we agree to disagree.

People talk about his effect on cycling, and when he was riding the Tour de France, he was omnipresent. It was always, “How is Lance going to react? What’s Lance going to do?” And it got to the point towards the end of those seven Tours where everyone knew how it was going to happen: his team, US Postal, were basically going to control the race, he was going to do well in the first time trial, he was going to smash everyone in the first mountain stage and then defend. So everyone’s race became based around Lance’s tactics and style of winning the race. Since he’s left, the race has become a lot more open, less predictable.

I was very surprised when I heard he was coming back. It is easy to stop loving the dieting, the lifestyle, the training, and pushing through the difficult moments when it’s not happening. But all of us love the racing when it’s going well – that’s why you do it. The only thing I can think of is that he missed the racing, which is understandable, because in order to win seven Tours, he has to love it deeply.

His performance at this year’s Giro d’Italia was immense. You have to put it in perspective: he had not raced for three years and he returned to the highest level and in no way made a fool of himself. It wasn’t an easy race, physically or mentally, and he didn’t throw in the towel; in the last week he was even getting stronger. He really believes he is going to be a force to be reckoned with at the Tour, there’s not the slightest iota of doubt there. That is what I think almost everybody does not understand: it’s not ego with Lance, it’s just utter self-belief.

I don’t think he will win this year’s Tour de France, but I wouldn’t put money against him either. He is capable of anything. But I think he is going to be a bit surprised by Alberto Contador. I’ve never seen a rider like him – he is definitely the greatest I’ve ever seen, and I think he will be the greatest ever Grand Tour rider. He’s very dignified, but he’s as driven as Lance, if not more so, and he has that anger streak with possibly more talent. Alberto is on an absolute mission and I think he wants to crush Lance at the Tour. It’s going to make for a great race.

Lance’s legacy is huge – it goes way beyond one race, one Tour de France. And he has the opportunity to cement his legacy, ironically, in defeat. I think this year’s Tour is going to do his popularity in France a world of good, because if he doesn’t win then the French will love him, as long as he shows character and resilience and races with a bit of panache. It will show another side of the man that I’m sure exists.

• David Millar is a cyclist with Garmin-Slipstream, who will this year be competing in his ninth Tour