I've grown rather tired of this suggestion that robo-Lance or any of the other pre-race favorites are to be criticized if they ride in a manner designed to have them on the top of the podium on the last day rather than "romance" the sport. The point of competing is to win within the rules, and no one has ever done that in Le Tour as well as Armstrong. If you think the players should be fellating their handlebars in love with the sport rather than making judicious use of their teammates and their own physical reserves in finding a way to the ultimate goal, that's your opinion. You can have your romantic "leaders and fighters". The rest of us will take a steady, heady, shrewd, and occasionally fierce Armstrong as a model to emulate on the bike.
(In the meantime, I don't know what more you want some of these riders to do to satisfy your sense of the dramatic. So Armstrong hasn't been out front where you prefer to see your heros. Instead, he's been dodging his fallen rivals by biking through fields on a perilous descent, being toppled by stray shopping bag handles, faking exhaustion and then blowing past the gallant but hapless Ullrich, withstanding dehydration to lose only precious seconds to Ullrich in a desperate time-trial scenario, powering past an astonished Kloden to win in Grand Bornand in retribution to the German fans who spat on him the day before on Alpe D'Huez, chasing down Simeoni to swat him out of a breakway in another spiteful retort, etc. etc. etc. For better or worse, there's not another rider in the peleton these days that has been that much fun to watch, in my opinion anyway.)
Finally, I would suggest it's easy for you to say that the GC contenders need to be out front attacking at every opportunity. Who would let them? Cycling times have changed since the Cannibal was around, and besides, there was no one capable of marking the great Eddy consistently when he was in his prime and decided to go. These days in France in July, everyone, and I mean everyone, knows exactly where Armstrong (and Ullrich . . . and Vino . . . etc.) is at every moment. Any attempt by him to breakaway or engage in one of the reckless escapades you find so "romantic" would be met with instant retaliation by all his rivals. The only way for a marked man to win a tour these days is to be great in the time trials, where group tactics cannot be used to neutralize a star, and to excel in the mountains by using your team as long as possible and then by showing your cards on ascent finishes. No one does this on a consistent basis as well as Armstrong these days, and that's why he's a six-time Tour winner and your heros like Simoni and Di Luca are mere mortals.
Point is, if you're a pre-Tour contender these days, no one is going to let you ride out front for very long unless you're down in the GC by double-digit minutes.
I'm no Armstrong fanatic, and like many others, I would love to have seen him expand his horizons by doing the other grand tours on occasion, or more of the Classics. But I must begrudgingly and definitively acknowledge the man's unparallelled ability to doggedly focus on his one true goal every year, and achieve it. That's a quality to admire above and beyond the guy who goes out front and throws caution to the wind. Unless, of course, your goal is to appeal to the "romance" of the sport rather than to finish first at the end of the month.
End of diatribe.
