He might not be your cup of coffee, but Lance Armstrong is undeniably good for one thing every time he rides a Tour: an explosion of American media punditry on a sport no one cared about two weeks ago or will care about by the end of July.

Most columns and op/ed pieces tend to revolve around Lance the man, and his victories or faults.

But once in awhile, somebody somewhere puts an opinion to paper that is both original and uncommon. CBS Sports’ Greg Doyel has done just that.

Doyel, for whom I have a large amount of respect as a national (and this time international) sports columnist, essentially poses the argument: If Lance can beat almost-terminal cancer, win seven straight Tours, take three years off then return and still be at or near the top of the sport, is he really that good, or is cycling just terrible?

The venerated Doyel comes to the latter conclusion, evoking the mandatory comeback comparison to Michael Jordan, who Doyel aptly describes as “a shell of his former self” when Sir Altitude returned with the Wizards a few years on from retirement.

Through this analogy, Doyel paints a picture of the idea that “comebacks” tend to make painfully clear what coming back to the well one too many times will do to an athlete’s legacy. And yet, here is Armstrong, out in front again.

Doyel addresses doping in the way it probably should be addressed — that everybody who’s anybody does it anyway, so the cream of the crop should still rise.

So then, it must be cycling that is deficient, not the other way ‘round.

But here’s why Doyel is wrong:

First, to compare an instinctive sport like basketball to an endurance sport like cycling is folly.

Basketball — and for that matter football, baseball, soccer, etc. — is a sport built on reaction time and quickness. A half-second can mean the difference between a blocking foul or a charge, an easy dunk or a fumbling turnover.

Like most other sports, it’s also incredibly tough on the body. The day-to-day pound of getting up and down the court beats down the joints, ligaments and tendons, causing wear and eventually injury and a natural slowing of the quickness upon which previous success was built.

The effect that cycling has on the body is nothing like that of basketball. It causes minimal stress to anything but the muscles.

Furthermore, in cycling, instead of being instinctive reaction-based, is more anatomically driven.

Physically speaking, the heart of your professional cyclist is considerably larger than that of a normal person, giving the cyclist a clear sporting advantage due to his or her body’s ability to pump more blood through the body faster, helping muscles carry heavier workloads and recover more quickly.

Barring some pre-existing condition or artificial mistreatment, Lance Armstrong’s powerful heart (and subsequent VO2 max numbers, etc.) won’t just go away over time, the way Michael Jordan’s ability to beat a defender into the lane might.

The second flaw in Doyel’s argument comes in a simple understanding of the sport of cycling itself.

Sports like basketball, because they are driven by those aforementioned skills, are usual best played at a younger age. As time wears down the body, so will it wear down the skills.

Jordan’s best statistical years came between 1986 and 1993, from the time he was 23 to the time he was 29.

But because cycling is a sport that generally develops more slowly in the body and has more staying power due to the lack of wear-and-tear, most pros reach the peak of their careers well later than most athletes.

To turn Doyel’s argument back to him, Lance Armstrong won his first Tour when he was 27, and his last when he was 33. That stretch was almost identical to Jordan’s heyday in terms of length, but it came later, chronologically.

When Jordan came back from his foray into baseball, after a year away from the game, he was 31, and yet he still continued to perform at a high level for four more years. That’s right where Lance is right now, four years on and still likely lasting at the edge of his prime as a competitive cyclist.

No, cycling isn’t that bad, and Lance is no superman compared to how he performed from ‘99 to ‘05.

If anything, he’s been far more human than he used to be, a sign that yes, he is getting older. It’s just that the nature of his sport means he’ll reach the limits of his ability well later than many of his contemporaries in other sports.