In cycling more than elsewhere perhaps, the wheel turns and things change, but traditions hold strong. And it is with renewed pleasure that every year, for more than seventy years now, the Paris-Nice race sets the tone. Like a landmark. Like a beacon lighting up the new season. In 2005, the "race to the sun" will provide contenders with a terrain favourable to all that dare. A route where anything is possible, neither too easy nor too tough, and a route to stimulate the brain cells, like the glorious feat of the Jaksche team playing with the wind to eliminate opposition during last year's edition. Over a circuit very similar to that of the 2002 edition, in which Bodrogi and Rous finished in the same second, the prologue will be full of suspense, held in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the Hauts-de-Seine region where we have been welcomed each year since A.S.O. took over the competition. The rugged routes of the Massif Central, the hills of the South, mastered so well by Vinokourov, promise us a breathtaking race right up to Nice, where an ultimate and tense stage will punctuate the competition, culminating in the col d’Eze and the Turbie and, for the first time, the col de la Porte. But the highlight event of this 63rd edition of Paris-Nice has to be Lance Armstrong's return to the competition. Winner of the Tour de France six times over, he has indeed declared that he will be present. After his cancer, at the end of winter 1998 - seven years ago, an eternity - the American was looking for his bearings and a new meaning to his life as a champion. He had left racing demoralised, spent, exhausted, and many believed him incapable of ever returning to the ranks of cycling. You are familiar with the rest of the story: his amazing willpower, his impossible comeback, and now the absolute record of victories on the Tour. A lesson, or rather a glow of light that tells us that we must never give up. Christian Prudhomme