Dopes at the Tour de France

Floyd Landis was virtually stripped of his Tour de France title last week, as race organizers pilloried the top 2006 finisher after his second positive test for an excess ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, or something like that (Landis insists that we in the media can't get it right). Here's the easy part: by denouncing its 2006 winner, the Tour de France has now gone 10 years without a top rider touched by scandal. And it's the race organizers' fault.

People want an edge in the world's hardest sporting event, and the Tour de France has gone handlebar-in-handlebar with designer drugs for a decade. Cycling got a pass for seven of those years because Lance Armstrong so thoroughly pummeled his peers that it was irrelevant whether or not he was cheating. If he was, so was everyone else, and he pounded them. He never tested positive for banned drugs but was then dogged by second-hand allegations, which he famously brushed aside in a television commercial, quipping, "What am I on? I'm on my bike."

Now he's on stage at the ESPYs, hosting ESPN's sports awards show, and on TV again, asking us to help him fight cancer. He's a Hollywood star.

Landis is also on TV, a fallen idol asking us not to rush to judgment and offering a rash of reasons for his positive test: his testosterone levels were naturally distorted; he drank the night before; he was dehydrated. Each of these ruses has been rebuffed by experts and, more damningly, by a skeptical public. He also said athletes would be "crazy" to use testosterone the way he has been accused of using it. This may be true, but he still sounds guilty.

After his backup blood sample was found to be similarly tainted to the first, Landis was summarily fired by his Phonak team. They're with the Tour's organizers: two strikes and you're out, as long as the team and Tour stay above the fray.

This is a joke. The Tour organizers would rather blame the riders than face reality. They have caused this problem. If the Tour de France powers that be want to have a clean race, they can have a clean race.

The Tour de France is the single hardest sporting event in the world in an age where baseball players, the historically large-tummied, beer-swilling athletes, are beefing up with BALCO. The Tour currently tests each stage winner, the overall leader and three random riders every day, and the results are not known for days. Maybe I'm crazy, but here's a simple solution to stunt steroid use: test every rider every day.

This would obviously be cumbersome and expensive, but it's possible. It's also the only way to salvage the Tour from becoming an Olympic weightlifting-level designer drug freakshow. There are so many suspected cheaters that it's impossible to try and weed them out piecemeal, like Tour organizers did this year when 1997 champion Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso were ousted on suspicion of doping before the Tour even began. We were supposed to get a clean champion, and we didn't. We only got the best of the rest of the cheaters.

Our new champion is Oscar Pereiro, but he hasn't been held up to the same scrutiny as Landis. He now says he's happy to have won, but he previously lamented the "academic victory" he was facing, should Landis face the music.

Well, the fat lady has sung, and she'll keep singing until the Tour gets its act together (or she gets on a bike and rides the pounds off). There is never going to be another legitimate Tour winner until the entire field is clean. If everyone is tested every day, the Tour will once again be the showcase for the most insanely conditioned athletes on the planet - conditioned by pasta and PowerBars, and maybe some Jack Daniels, but no designer drugs.

The Tour only has a couple more chances. It can still happen, but the wheels are starting to fall off.

(Image from flickr.)