It’s a hard time to be a fan of professional cycling – especially when Tour de France time comes around each July. Last year, we thrilled to Floyd Landis’ thrashing of the rest of the peleton after a disastrous day in the Alps, only to find out that he was blood doping in order to accomplish this amazing feat (I guess the “if it’s too good to be true” adage holds for cycling as well).
This year, we watched Alexandre Vinokourov (Team Astana) take a horrible fall and battle back into relevance with a fantastic time trial stage victory and a mountain stage victory before testing positive for blood doping and having he and his entire team yanked from the race. The next day Italian Christian Moreni (Team Cofidis) tested positive and was arrested and hauled to jail by French authorities. Today, Tour leader (wearer of the yellow jersey) Michael Rasmussen (Team Rabobank) was taken out of contention by his team (along with the rest of the team) for lying about his whereabouts while missing three random drug tests during the lead-up to the Tour.
The Vinokourov affair was the most heartbreaking to me. The guy just seemed to have so much heart, and he rode his guts out despite his injuries (over sixty stitches to his knees and elbow) and had tremendous fan support along the way. Rasmussen had a dark cloud over him from the get go, and was even booed at the start line of today’s stage in Gourette.
The good news (so far) is that the remaining top three riders (Alberto Contador, Cadel Evans and Levi Leipheimer) seem to be squeaky clean and have raced very well up to this point, and two of them race for the USA’s Team Discovery Channel. We’ll see…