RAPALLO, Italy – It was the closest race since Greg Lemond staged a miraculous comeback in 1989 and raced Laurent Fignon down the Champs Élysées for an eight-second victory. It was the most inspiring personal story since Lance Armstrong overcame testicular cancer to win a record seven straight titles.

But instead of remembering Alberto Contador’s Tour de France victory yesterday as the secondclosest in Tour history, or as the story of a young and brash Spaniard who overcame a life-threatening blood clot in his brain to surpass everyone’s expectations and capture cycling’s top prize, this Tour will be remembered as the year the sport nearly died, and Contador can be expected to be looked upon as the man to help bring it back to life.

For the second year in a row, the Grand Boucle departed without its star competitors, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, both caught up in blood-doping troubles. At the same time, the 1996 winner, Bjarne Riis, was stripped of his title when he admitted to doping.

France’s greatest sporting tradition was dealt a near fatal blow when the pre-Tour favorite, Alexander Vinokourov, was removed after his blood samples from before the race failed a steroid test. The coup de grâce appeared to come when the leader at the end of the 16th stage, Michael Rasmussen, was fired by his team for having lied about his whereabouts during drug tests.

The yellow jersey then went to second-placed Contador and with it a responsibility to prove to the world that these athletes are worth admiring.

But a huge question mark remains: Is Contador himself clean? He was tossed from last year’s Tour along with eight other riders as fallout from the now-famous Operacion Puerto, a Spanish police sting that involved hundreds of athletes around Europe. Cycling officials cleared Contador of any wrongdoing in that investigation, but only a negative result on his drug tests in the coming days will afford some assurance that not everyone in this sport is cheating.

Contador repeatedly has denied any involvement with performance-enhancing drugs, and so for now, the 450,000-euro payout and a potential three-year contract worth about $2 million with a team are his to lose.

At 24, he stands to earn much more in endorsements if he were to become the next Miguel Indurain, the last Spaniard to win the Tour, who went on to win it four more times. Or — dare we say it — the next Armstrong.

The Spaniard said he drew inspiration from Armstrong’s book as he tried to re-enter competition after he suffered a blood clot as the result of an accident and underwent surgery.

The Texan champ followed the Tour as a consultant with his former team, Discovery Channel, for the final two stages.

“I think we’ve seen the future of Spanish cycling, and perhaps even international cycling,” Armstrong said after his team’s victory. (Judging from the final classification, in which more than half of the top 10 hail from Spain, those two things may be one and the same.)

Discovery Channel’s team leader Levi Leipheimer finished third, behind Cadel Evans, who were 31 and 23 seconds behind the Spaniard, respectively. This victory was that much more immense for a team looking for a new sponsor after the cable channel dropped its backing in February. Italian state television RAI reported that the Discovery Channel team has found a new sponsor, but did not identify it by name.

Had Rasmussen not been removed, these results would have been very different, as the Dane presumably would have finished with more than a minute’s margin. Instead, the suspicions of Tour officials and those of the rest of the peloton turned out to be correct: Rasmussen was lying. He said he was in Mexico when drug test authorities were looking for him. In fact he was at home, in Italy.

In an interview with French sports daily L’Equipe after Contador’s win, the president of the company that organizes the Tour, Patrice Clerc, had some initial thoughts on how the sport might be able to clean up its act in the future, and win back its respect. One thought was to use national teams, rather than those backed by individual corporate sponsors.

“We will never reach the point of zero risk,” he said. “But there is a potential response, where every rider will have regular checkups and will be forced to carry a passport with the results overseen by its team.”

Many more proposals can be expected over the coming days. If this Tour has proved anything, it is that cycling is at the cutting edge of resolving the problem of performance-enhancing dugs. The names of athletes on the list provided by Operacion Puerto represent a range of sports, but no other sport has ever gone as far as stripping its winner of the equivalent of the yellow jersey.

Whether cycling is truly that much dirtier than other sports is open to debate, but there can be no question that no other competition airs its dirty laundry quite as openly.

jmoretti@nysun.com