Break up Lance Armstrong.

No, really. Cut him up into the logical parts, perform rigorous tests on every limb, sinew and cell, and belt-sand the rest. It's going to be the only thing that satisfies the people who think bicycle races are rolling pharmacies anyway.

	Lance Armstrong has been in control for the past week.

Armstrong won his third consecutive Tour de France victory, a remarkable feat for anyone, let alone anyone who beat testicular cancer. He is by most measures, from the People Magazine measure to the endorsement measure to the public service announcement measure, an athletic hero.

But a lot of people were heroes until they were found out not to be heroes. Armstrong's speed in the Tour, in fact, can be traced in part to his attempt to outrun the people who question his much-touted drug-free status in a sport notorious for its attention to chemical outreach.

Thus, as much as people root actively for his triumph in Paris, they root for him to be dead-cert correct in his assertions that he has been, is, and will always be drug-free.

Armstrong, you see, is in a strange position, not of his own making. He has chosen to excel at the highest levels of a sport rife with drug use and abuse, and he has chosen to stand as the beacon for drug-free triumph.

All of which is well and good, all the better if it is in fact true. Here, we see no evidence that it is anything but the truth. We don't know that no evidence exists, but we surely know that if any did, we haven't seen it. That's as close to proof as we can get, or as close as Armstrong can show us. You can't prove that something isn't true, after all.

But proof by insinuation is all the rage these days. Circumstantial evidence meets the standard for accusation. Someone else did it, therefore ...

Armstrong's innocence to date (he's passed every drug tests given him) hasn't stopped the whispers. His relationship with Dr. Michele Ferrari (and if that isn't name out of a Peter Sellers movie, what is?) has made them only louder.

But whispers don't count, not to the innocent. If Armstrong is as clean as the evidence indicates, there isn't a whisper that can change that, or his position on the dwindling list of heroes without overt blemish in the sports business.

Sounds good to us, all things considered. That's the way it ought to be.

But Americans forgive hypocrisy last of all. If somehow Armstrong were shown to be other than what he purports, his fall would be swift, sure and irrevocable. Remember Ben Johnson? Multiply it by 25.

Call it the truly dark side of the business. Lance Armstrong is being pursued by rumors that don't even connect themselves to him, and he's still having to answer them. And having achieved what he has, having made himself a inspirational figure in the most personal way imaginable, those who believe in athletic role models rather need to him to be as advertised.

In fact, we all do, to an extent.

He is better than most role models in that he doesn't stand in shopping mall lobbies saying, "Hi, Lance Armstrong, Role Model. Want to touch my bike?" He speaks about beating cancer and about devoting his professional life to being the best bicycle rider he (or anyone else, for that matter) can be. He doesn't say, "Be like me." He says, "I'm me. You take what example you want from it."

The distinction is important, because it separates Armstrong from a bunch of cloying, repellent phonies, turning on the charm just before a new deal.

So we root for Armstrong to be the real deal, even more than we root him to win the only bike race any of us pay any attention to at all. So far, he hasn't disappointed on either level; those who know him speak unanimously on his behalf.

That is, except for those who see his rear deflector as it crosses the finish line in Paris, and see the trail of blown drug tests elsewhere in the sport Lance Armstrong elevates. For them A (Lance Armstrong is the best bike rider on the tour today) still equals B (There are a lot of drug users in bike racing) and therefore equals C (Armstrong must be on the juice).

The rest of us will just have to live happily with what knowledge there is. That A is true, and B is true. We're a long, long way from C.

It would do us all a world of good to remember that.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com