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PARIS, Oct 3, 2008 (AFP) – The new president of the Tour de France’s parent company Amaury Sports Organization (ASO), Jean-Etienne Amaury, has welcomed the news of seven-time winner Lance Armstrong’s return to the sport.

However Amaury, who took over from the recently departed Patrice Clerc two days ago, said the American – who despite never testing positive courted plenty of doping controversy during his career – will have no special treatment.

“We’ve got no qualms about Armstrong coming back to the Tour,” Amaury told Bicycle.net Friday.

“But we’ll be playing close attention to make sure he respects all requests that are made in an anti-doping framework to the letter.”

Days after Armstrong’s seventh Tour victory in 2005 French sports daily L’Equipe alleged that several of his samples, kept since 1999 and tested retroactively, tested positive for EPO (erythropoietin).

Armstrong swiped the claims aside, but experts in recent days have offered to re-test Armstrong’s samples in a bid to “prove his good faith”.

“The way these samples are preserved and the volume of them mean that you can do an analysis for the possible presence of EPO on at least five stages of the 1999 Tour de France,” said a statement from France’s national anti-doping agency AFLD.

Armstrong spurned the offer, claiming “mishandling” issues with the testing laboratory and claiming the same lab, at Chatenay-Malabry near Paris, also botched his 1998 samples.

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