July 6, 2007 - This year's Tour de France is going to be different.
At least, that's the line professional cycling is pushing. Two weeks
ago, the International Cycling Union (UCI) asked riders to sign an
antidoping charter before the start of this year's three-week stage
race, which begins Saturday. If found guilty of doping, riders agree
to pay the ICU the equivalent of a year's salary in addition to
serving the standard two-year suspension from cycling. Tour
organizers insist that any rider who does not sign cannot start the
race.

You can almost hear cycling fans the world over breathing a
resounding sigh of "So what?" Doping has long been as inextricable a
part of the culture as shaven legs and skinny tires. But Lance
Armstrong's domination of the Tour attracted a worldwide audience,
and with that audience came more money—and increased scrutiny. Now,
with sponsors threatening to defect to less volatile (if less
dramatic) sports, cycling's governing bodies have been forced to
react publicly. And even the most abiding fans have to be asking
themselves how much more they can take.

To better understand the fans' exasperation, simply compare two new
books: one from Floyd Landis, "Positively False: the Real Story of
How I Won the Tour de France," and one from sports journalist David
Walsh, "From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy
at the Tour de France." The books couldn't present more opposite
views. Landis, whose book is bound in sunny yellow cloth, pretends
doping doesn't exist. Walsh, whose book is bound in Darth Vader
black, casts a cold eye across the peloton and sees an epidemic of
doping.

Not long ago, pro cycling merely had an image problem. Three days
before the 1998 Tour de France, French customs officials found more
than 400 vials of performance-enhancing drugs in a support car
belonging to Festina, the Spanish team that was then No. 1 in the
world. Festina was expelled, and five other Spanish teams quit the
race—the official reason was to protest riders' treatment by the
French police, who had been invited by Tour organizers to search
hotels and support vehicles for drugs, but cynics (or realists,
depending on whom you talk to) said the teams chose to leave before
their stashes, too, were discovered by gendarmes. Armin Meier, one of
the Festina riders who confessed to doping, lamented, "It is like
being on a motorway and everyone is doing 100 kilometers an hour when
the speed limit is 90 kilometers per hour, but only the Festina
riders have been punished."


Last summer, eight years after what has been dubbed the Tour du
Dopage, cycling's image problem became critical. "Floyd Landis was
the tipping point," says Frankie Andreu, a former rider for the U.S.
Postal team and now a commentator for Versus television, who admits
to having doped. "It caused chaos throughout the cycling industry and
the sporting world, and it hurt the Tour economically." If Tour
winner Landis's positive test for synthetic testosterone was the
tipping point, Operation Puerto had already given the sport a shove.
The Spanish doping inquiry named 58 cyclists allegedly involved with
sports doctor Eufemanio Fuentes, who was accused of providing drugs,
transfusions and overseeing the riders' doping schedules. Thirteen
riders were barred from starting the 2006 Tour de France, including
favorites Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich. Basso has since been handed a
two-year suspension for "attempted doping," and Ullrich chose to
retire rather than submit to a DNA test that could have cleared his
name.

Landis, who has maintained his innocence since testing positive for
synthetic testosterone use during his victorious Tour last year, is
awaiting the decision of a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA)
arbitration panel. If the panel rules that his tests are flawed,
he'll retain his yellow jersey and will avoid a two-year suspension.
If he loses, he could appeal, but he's said that the legal fight has
left him financially drained, so the panel's decision could be final.
As Landis's legal team has pointed out on numerous occasions, doping
tests are not the same as pregnancy tests—they are procedurally
complex, and require interpretation by scientists. But that doesn't
leaven the public perception that pro cyclists live in a bizarre
parallel universe where scientific results are no more trustworthy
than gossip on a bathroom wall.

In "Positively False," Landis admits as much, but adds that because a
rider is "assumed to be guilty from the very beginning," the accused
has no choice but to proclaim his innocence—even in the face of a
positive test. To say anything less would amount to admitting guilt.
He mounts his defense by first presenting his rise to Tour champion
from humble Mennonite roots in Pennsylvania. The tone is upbeat, and
Landis comes across as a focused, if rebellious, cyclist with
tremendous talent. For the first 10 chapters, there's almost no
mention of drug use in cycling, except to make the point that he
followed the UCI's and the World Anti-Doping Agency's rules to the
letter. The way to win the Tour, according to Landis, is simple:
train harder and longer than everyone else. Drugs don't enter the
equation. The last five chapters, which Landis's lawyers admit
violates a gag order issued by the USADA, focus on his pending case
and amount to an indictment of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the UCI,
the USADA and the French lab that conducted his doping tests—
organizations, Landis says, that attack innocent athletes while
letting the real cheaters slip away.

The key to winning the Tour, according to David Walsh's "From Lance
to Landis," is to dope harder than everyone else. Walsh has done his
research, and he presents pages of interviews with former U.S. Postal
riders and staffers, including Andreu. But in his quest to take down
Lance Armstrong, Walsh fails to find hard evidence. It's clear that
Armstrong was riding among dopers, but even if he contributed to the
culture by encouraging a pro-doping atmosphere at U.S. Postal, that
doesn't make Armstrong a doper. Smart enough to see the holes in his
own argument, Walsh relies heavily on scientific data to plug them.
He compares watts (the standard measure of a rider's power), VO2 max
(a measure of endurance) and hematocrit levels (the percentage of
oxygen-shuttling red cells in a rider's blood) and implies that if
one racer's numbers are better than another, the only way the lesser
rider can win is to use performance-enhancing drugs. In a laboratory
setting, he's probably right. But the Tour doesn't take place in a
lab.

The truth probably lies somewhere between Landis's and Walsh's books.
Cycling isn't innocent, but it's not rotten to the core, either, and
neither view is going to help clean up the sport. And though it's
been a painful bloodletting, there are signs of genuine change. Both
the CSC team, the 1996 Tour winner managed by Bjarne Riis, who has
admitted to doping, and T-Mobile, Jan Ullrich's former team, have
instituted internal drug tests that exceed WADA and UCI standards.
U.S. team Slipstream/Chipotle has hired an outside organization to
conduct regular testing of its riders to the tune of about $400,000 a
year. And while Slipstream/Chipotle won't be competing this time
around, "This year we'll get a Tour de France with a very different
attitude from riders and directors," according to Frankie Andreu. For
the fans' sake, let's hope so.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19621101/site/newsweek/?>