time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong will make his cycling comeback with the Astana team. The 37-year-old Armstrong said on Wednesday he will reunite with Astana team director Johan Bruyneel, who was the team leader for Armstrong's record tally of Tour wins. “While we looked at other teams and talked to other teams, as a friend and as a longtime partner and as somebody that really trusts Johan on every little decision in the program, I could not ever imagine racing against him or racing without him,” Armstrong said. The only major race before the Tour that he knows he will definitely compete in is the Tour Down Under in Adelaide, Australia, in January. Kazakh Cycling Federation deputy chief Nikolai Proskurin told The Associated Press that Armstrong agreed to ride for the Kazakhstan-based team for free the first year and has signed up to take part in five races, including the Tour de France. Armstrong said he has committed only for next year, but he wouldn't rule out competing beyond 2009. He has dedicated his comeback to raising global awareness for the fight against cancer. Also, to try to prove that he is clean to skeptics who doubted that he could have achieved his feats without using performance-enhancing drugs, he is adding a new member to his team: Anti-doping expert Don Catlin, who will run a program to regularly test Armstrong. Catlin oversaw testing for anabolic agents at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and ran America's first anti-doping lab at UCLA for 25 years. He now runs Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit organization he founded to research performance-enhancing drugs, uncover new drugs being used illegally and develop tests to detect them. Catlin will post the results of Armstrong's tests on the Web. Armstrong said he had given Catlin permission to test him anytime, anywhere. Catlin will be paid by Astana, but Armstrong insisted it wasn't a case of buying his approval, because Catlin wouldn't risk his credibility by telling anything but the truth. “I'm going to ride my bike, I'm going to spread this message (about the fight against cancer) around the world, and Don Catlin can tell you if I'm clean or not.” What Armstrong's Astana team will look like is unclear. Alberto Contador, the 2007 Tour de France champ, might already be looking for a new team. In a statement released by Astana on Wednesday, Contador was conciliatory, but didn't commit to remaining on the team. “Right now people are looking to make up controversy, but honestly I have no ill will toward Lance,” he said. Earlier, in a speech to an audience full of political and corporate leaders at the Clinton Global Initiative, Armstrong announced that his foundation was committing $8 million over five years to expand its fight against cancer from the US to underserved parts of the world such as Africa and South America. He said that his decision to come back was as much about spreading his message as it was his desire to compete. - AP __
