Calling it now

Lance Armstrong won't be racing the Tour in 2009.

Sure, he's said he will in Vanity Fair - what the hell tone does that set, by the way? - and confirmed it with CNN and with a mass email to the Livestrong email list for which I don't remember signing up.

I hereby predict that it's all poppycock. Horse hockey. Meadow muffins. Bullshit.

Here's the first clue: Johan Bruyneel, who runs Armstrong's potential team, had no idea what anyone was talking about. Maybe it was a sworn-to-secrecy, deny-deny-deny sort of scheme, to keep the focus on Lance's big announcement (in Vanity f'ing Fair). It sounded to me like he genuinely had never been informed of Armstrong's plan.

For a man whose modus operandi was borderline-compulsive planning, this seems like something he would've wanted to iron out.

Having thought about this for all of 20 seconds - 20 seconds I'll never get back [he writes in the middle of a blog post he's spent at least 5 minutes on so far] - it seems clear that this is a familiar plot from Armstrong's playbook. He's done this before, and I won't be surprised if he does it again.

Recall 2005. Recall how Armstrong spent time in the wind tunnel over the winter... time on a TRACK bike. Recall how much press he generated, planning his record breaking (surely it could go no other way) Hour Record attempt. And then in April, when he called a press conference, we were all sure it would be to announce the time and place for the attempt. The bomb he dropped, that he would retire after that year's Tour, was all the more incendiary for the unexpectedness of it.

Bait and switch, people. Armstrong does it, and he does it well.

Expect something big from him in Spring '09. Just don't expect it to be what he's telling us now.