Cycling of all kinds in France during the 2000s has been the subject of increased interest from citizens and the state. The cycle industry has benefited from a growing uptake of cycling as recreational sport, transport/ personal mobility and recreational leisure. And professional cycle sport, in the form of the Tour de France, has maintained its hold on the popular imagination, despite frequent suspicions that the endemic drug-taking of the 1990s that culminated in the ‘Tour of Shame’ in 1998 could sound the death-knell of the event. In 2003 no less official an institution than the august Bibliothèque nationale de France at Tolbiac hosted a conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Tour. The new-found popularity of the Tour was in part due to the heavy mediatization – by L'Equipe and by most other French newspapers as well as other media – of the phenomenal success of the US rider and cancer-survivor Lance Armstrong, whose seven wins in the event inspired admiration, suspicion and resentment in equal measure among sports commentators, fans and the general public. The French public avidly consumed books by or about Armstrong (Armstrong, Jenkins and Renaudo, 2000; Armstrong, Jenkins and Girard, 2003; Ballester and Walsh, 2006; Laborde, 2006; Ducoin, 2009; Ledanff, 2010). If the ambivalence over Armstrong's domination of pro-racing's flagship event reflected the enduring French love–hate relationship with the United States since 1945 and before, it was also driven by misgivings about his often-alleged but never-proven use of performance-enhancing ‘preparation’ (something of a new concern, historically, given the long history of doping in pro-cycling) and by a distaste for his business-like method of winning, deemed by some to be cynical and disrespectful to the traditions and ethics of sport. Thus what we can call the ‘Armstrong Affair’ of the 2000s mobilized concerns around the ‘purity’ of sport similar to those which in the 1880s and 1890s had exercised defenders of amateurism against professionalism, of pacing against individual riding or other principles of fair competition.