Last Tuesday — a day after dragging his arse over the ‘hell of the north’, the 13km section of cobblestone road connecting Belgium to France on the third stage of this year’s Tour de France — Lance Armstrong said that ”some days you’re the hammer, some days you’re the nail.”

Armstrong’s hope of winning, and perhaps of even finishing, this year’s Tour look as bruised and bloodied as his body after yesterday’s eighth stage. He crashed badly at the foot of the first serious climb of the Tour and lost valuable time and energy in getting back to the pack. He crashed again a few kilometres later when he got tangle with a couple a Basque riders from the Euskadi Euskatel team at a feed station.

At the end of the day Armstrong came in almost 12 minutes behind new leader, Australian Cadel Evans. Armstrong, like many on the Tour this year, will spend the rest day licking his wounds — and perhaps contemplating the next hammer that is coming his way.

Armstrong’s troubles aren’t just on the bike. For years he has been dogged by a series of allegations that the key to his phenomenal success was that he was a doper, a cheat. Armstrong has consistently denied — in the strongest possible terms — that he has ever done anything illegal. And so far no-one has been able to prove a thing against him; he has never failed a doping test and none of the numerous allegations against him have ever been proven.

In May this year Floyd Landis — a former teammate of Armstrong and self-confessed doper, cheat and liar — made a series of public allegations that Armstrong and a swathe of other top cyclists closely associated with him over the years had been involved in the systematic use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and doping techniques. In many respects Landis has zero credibility — he was stripped of his 2006 win in the Tour after testing positive for synthetic testosterone and had lied about his own use of PEDs.

The core of Landis’s allegations was nothing new — what was news was that all of a sudden all sorts of people were taking them seriously. Foremost among these — and most worrying for Armstrong and his coterie — is the attention of Jeff Novitsky, a special agent of the criminal division of the US Food and Drug Administration (the FDA).

Novitsky has some serious runs on the board, having led the case that successfully busted the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) case that involved a number of high profile American track and field athletes, American football players and baseballers. And perhaps most interesting about Novitsky’s investigation is that it isn’t just looking at whether any particular cyclists or their teams were involved in doping or the use of PEDs — a case that may be difficult to make in American courts if that activity took place offshore.

Novitsky’s investigation is focused on whether Armstrong, his managers and teammates conspired to defraud sponsors — chiefly the government-owned US Postal Service that sponsored Armstrong’s team during his incredible winning run from 1998 to 2004 — by using PEDs and doping techniques to improve performances and winnings.

Landis followed up his public allegations with a series of interviews with Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell of the Wall Street Journal that, on the day before the start of this year’s Tour, published an explosive piece that they say exposes the rotten core of professional cycling:

The picture painted by Mr Landis in the interviews, and in a series of emails he wrote to cycling sponsors in May, provides the most detailed view yet of what may be one of the biggest and most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies in sports history. It involves blood transfusions taken in a bus on a remote alpine road, riders wearing testosterone patches to bed, and an operative posing as an autograph-seeking fan to deliver a bag of blood to a rider after a race…

“Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago,” Mr Armstrong said. “We have a person who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone who took money. He said he has no proof. It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility.”

And Armstrong’s lawyer Timothy Herman, responding to the WSJ article at Armstrong’s Livestrong site, was just as forthright:

“The more appropriate investigation and use of taxpayer money would focus on the confessed fraud committed by Landis, an admitted perjurer with an agenda. These kind of leaks, and the stories based on them, are inaccurate, are extraordinarily unfair, and are used for publicity and advancing personal agendas. Leaks and stories like this fundamentally undermine our justice system.”

That may well be true, but finishing this year’s Tour, and dealing with the allegations by Landis and Novitsky’s investigations aren’t the only things that Armstrong and his crew will have to worry about in the coming months. As Bloomberg News reported last week, other agencies, including anti-doping officials in the US, France and the World Anti-Doping Agency have all taken an interest in these matters. And Interpol, which links international policing agencies and has long had in an interest in anti-doping activities, is acting to link up the now rapidly increasing number of inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic.

There are a number of Australian, cyclists, administrators and Armstrong boosters that will be watching these rapidly emerging developments with keen interest.