In the year of the comeback, we are starting to get some answers. Tiger Woods is back and searching for his touch; Ronaldo (the Brazilian version) has returned and is scoring goals; Jonny Wilkinson’s knee is on the mend again and he hopes to play next week. And Lance Armstrong? The seven-times Tour de France champion came back first, has been on the road again for nearly two months, yet hell knows how this one is going to play out.

Armstrong, for sure, is not the best rider in the world right now. He is not even the best in his team. The 37-year-old is carrying too much weight and could be courting humiliation on Mont Ventoux in July in the penultimate stage of the Tour de France. Yet it is still not beyond his means to emerge from a soap opera of politics the next day clad in a yellow jersey.

His line of communication these days is his Twitter feed, which boasts more that 325,000 followers. He revealed on Tuesday that he had just given his 24th dope test since his comeback. Far more revealing was last Saturday’s “tweet”, which has been roundly interpreted as an almighty kicking for his leading team-mate, but more on that later.

It still seems remarkable that Armstrong, your all-American hero, has made his comeback for a team riding under the flag of the former Soviet nation of Kazakhstan. It seems even more remarkable that he reintroduced himself as Mr Clean (those 24 tests etc), yet chose to link up with Team Astana — named after the Kazakh capital — who were excluded from the Tour de France last year because of doping issues.

But the real wisdom of him “turning Kazakh” will begin to play itself out next week as the unique internal politics of Team Astana unfold on the roads of northern Spain. Armstrong makes his European comeback tomorrow in the Milan-San Remo classic, but on Monday starts in the Tour of Castilla y Léon, a five-day stage race where he will be riding for the first time with Alberto Contador, his team-mate and his leading threat.

The story so far is that Armstrong finished 29th in the Tour Down Under in January and seventh in the Tour of California last month. These were races that he was not intending to win, although his disappointing time-trial in California is the clearest indication that he is not where he would like to be. Contador, meanwhile, won the Tour of Algarve last month and was the strongest rider, if not the winner, in the Paris-Nice race last week. Armstrong’s last Tour de France was 2005; Contador won in 2007 and won the Tours of Italy and Spain last year.

In other words, Contador is the new Armstrong. The question for the Tour de France, therefore, is whether Armstrong is going to race for the Spaniard or against him. The easy answer is against. When the most obstinate alpha male on wheels emerged from retirement, it was not with designs on a summer’s hard labour as another man’s domestique.

This story now moves briefly to Italy, where, in another stage race, the Tirreno-Adriatico, Andreas Klöden, also of Astana, was proof that one man cannot beat a team. On Monday, with Klöden, of Germany, looking a possible overall winner, three Italians teamed together to beat the lead out of him. Klöden has twice been second in the Tour de France and could see himself as a possible winner, but will sacrifice himself this year for the team leader. Likewise, Levi Leipheimer, who has four top-ten finishes. Astana are possibly the strongest stage-racing team to be assembled, yet no one knows who their leader is.

All this is “jostling for position”, says Sean Yates, the English former rider, a old room-mate of Armstrong and now a sports director on the Astana team. “You’ve got team-mates who used to work for Lance and when Lance retired, they moved over to Alberto,” Yates said. “And now Lance has come back, it’s like, ‘Who are we riding for?’ The camp is a bit divided and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the case.”

Not even Yates knows who they are riding for. “Normally the other riders sacrifice themselves until the leader is there at the end,” he said. “This time, there’s no way Lance is going to ride from the front to blow the opposition out and then leave Alberto on his own. And Alberto is a lot like Lance — he’s a very determined individual. Stubborn. It could be very interesting.”

Thus the fascination with the events in Spain next week. Armstrong is not in race-winning form yet and will be expected to ride for Contador, the defending champion. Yet Armstrong will be itching to make a grand statement in Tuesday’s time-trial.

The plan, as originally conceived, was to keep the pair apart until the Tour de France in July, yet here the “jostling” begins. Which brings us back to Armstrong’s “tweet” and Contador’s “bonk”.