PARIS: If only this were a year ago, how easy it would be to choose the most promising young bicycle rider for the next season.

Riccardo Riccò, for one. At age 25, the Italian with the Saunier Duval team was obviously on the brink of bursting forth. For the cognoscenti, Emanuele Sella, 27, a toiler for the Panaria team in his native Italy, was a diamond in the mud. So too Stefan Schumacher, 27, a German with Gerolsteiner in Germany, and his teammate Bernhard Kohl, 26, an Austrian.

They all delivered in 2008. Riccò finished second in the Giro d'Italia and won two climbing stages in the Tour de France. Sella won three mountain stages in the Giro and finished sixth. Schumacher won both long time trials in the Tour, and Kohl was king of the mountains there and finished third overall.

All were also busted for using illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Sella has been suspended for a year, Riccò and Kohl for two years each and Schumacher, alone in the quartet in still contesting his positive drug tests, awaits sentence.

Wow, this prediction business is full of traps. Who can guess which riders have been drinking from the poisoned chalice?

Nevertheless, duty calls. Caution rules out naming any promising riders from Belgium, Spain and Italy, hotbeds of suspicion. Common sense disqualifies anybody from France, where riders are clean but untalented.

Which leaves what?

Britain might be a contender with Mark Cavendish, 21, the crack sprinter, although he won 17 races this year, including four Tour stages, and is therefore no longer simply promising. Ditto Switzerland, where Fabian Cancellara, 27, has been around long enough to win two world time-trial championships and the Olympic gold medal in Beijing in that discipline.

Luxembourg? Andy Schleck, 23, was second in the Giro last year and the best young rider in the Tour, so is hardly a secret. The Netherlands? Eastern Europe?

America!

Meet the promising rider of 2009, Christian Vande Velde, a native of Illinois who would be the promising young rider of 2009 if only he weren't 32 years old.

So he'll turn 33 in May. So he's been around since 1998, riding for U.S. Postal Service, Liberty Seguros, CSC and now Garmin-Chipotle. So he has recorded fewer than half a dozen victories in his professional career, excluding team time trials. So what?

Smothered in obscurity as a support rider, Vande Velde began to emerge only this year, when he became the team leader in the Tour de France and finished fifth there, missing out on a chance at the Big Lebowski because of a dreadful crash on a descent in the mountains. (He will move up to fourth place if Kohl is disqualified.)

Vande Velde ended the Tour with a confidence in his abilities that he had never displayed before and a seeming determination that the best is yet to come.

Even better, he's clean. The Garmin team, based in the United States, has a stringent drug-testing program, and Vande Velde is in any case a straight-up guy. He may or may not win anything bigger than the Tour of Missouri, but he won't pull a Riccò, Sella, Kohl or Schumacher and fail a doping test.

And if Vande Velde isn't the most promising rider of the next season, perhaps it will be a fellow American.

He's named Lance Armstrong, hasn't won a big race in three years, is a tad out of competitive condition, but has potential. Definitely, he has potential.