By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Let's see now, excerpts from a book that hit Paris stores earlier in the week contain pointed allegations calculated to raise new suspicions about cyclist Lance Armstrong and performance-enhancing drugs.

Can there be any surer sign that another Tour de France will soon be upon us?

In baseball it is customary to throw out the first pitch to begin big events. In cycling — at least since Armstrong began to dominate the sport — they apparently first throw out allegations.

Gentlemen, start your bikes — and innuendo.

For about as long as there has been the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq there has been the all-out search for a smoking syringe from Armstrong. And, with about the same amount of success.

Armstrong will be going for a record sixth consecutive victory when the Tour begins its 91st year July 3 in Liege, Belgium. With portions of "L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong" having recently appeared in the French magazine L'Express, he will also be shadowed for 2,037 miles — roughly the distance between San Diego and Florida — by Trial de Lance's umpteenth rumor when cyclists begin their three-week competition.

Never mind that Armstrong, a cancer survivor and inspiration to millions worldwide, has been tested, retested and checked some more since winning his first Tour in 1999. He has never failed a drug test in a sport where the testing has nabbed dozens of riders with banned substances in their bodies. No inquiry into the sport, including a two-year French judicial investigation in 2000, has linked him with anything illegal. Not even Clouseau-like clandestine raids on his trash have turned up anything incriminating.

That hasn't quieted the whispers, stopped the double-entendre headlines or halted the taunts of "Dop-AY...Dop-AY" that have found Armstrong on even his most hinterland rounds.

Sadly, some of it is likely a xenophobic reaction in the Tour's homeland where no Frenchman has won this national showcase since 1985 and Armstrong, not always the most diplomatic of figures early on, has been viewed as aloof and swaggering.

There remains the disbelief that someone who had been given a 40-percent chance of surviving a battle with testicular cancer three years earlier, could fashion a record-tying streak of victories in sport's most arduous competition.

But, maybe, until there is at least a scintilla of proof to blot his record, it is about time to cut the guy a break for a while. After five years, Armstrong has certainly earned that much.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.