good article

"The Tour won't be itself until Lance Armstrong has a true successor--someone
who wins and keeps yellow, and returns to defend it. Until then, the advances in
drug screening can keep the show on the road, but the heart of the race will
keep bleeding on the asphalt."

----- Original Message -----



http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/starr/archive/2008/07/24/can-the-tour-de-fran\
ce-outrun-doping.aspx

NEWSWEEK's Lily Huang writes on this year's Tour de France:


A year ago the Tour de France disintegrated before it left the Alps. The
presumptive winner, Michael Rasmussen, fired by his team for evading doping
controls during training, lost the yellow jersey before he could finish. (Floyd
Landis, who tested positive post-race in 2006 for testosterone boosts, gave up
his title in a courtroom.). This year, the Tour is implementing a real crackdown
on substance abuse--so far, three riders have been kicked out of the race--and
fending off its troubled recent history with some serious rebranding.

Take a look at the poster that Tour organizers have heavily used to promote
the event: Front and center is a heart, tattooed onto a stretch of pavement.
Inside is the inscription "Le Tour Toujours"--the Tour forever. The symbolism
mimics the silent encouragement that devoted fans like to write in spray paint
on mountain roads to lift the pedals of their favorite riders. The inscription
makes this Tour sound like a return to some enduring essence, as though the
steady purging of compromised riders over the last two years was but a
nightmarish interlude.

The most extravagant bike race on earth used to be the story of men against
impossibility: Charly Gaul versus the storm, Tom Simpson versus the
Continentals, Marco Pantani versus the world. Now the Tour is about itself,
versus drugs. Dogged by drug scandals for the last ten years, the Tour has to
prove that it can recover, and still create a story that will go down in the
annals of the sport. This year's race rolled out under a new banner, but the
worst hallmarks of the old--drugs, lies, and sensationalist journalism--have yet
to be dropped.

Along with the general paranoia of recurring scandal is a deepening distrust
of whoever is wearing the leader's yellow jersey. Last year's eventual champion,
Alberto Contador, was not allowed to compete in this year's race; he and the
rest of Lance Armstrong's former team had signed with the Kazakh conglomerate
sponsor Astana, which Tour organizers decided to penalize for previous doping
offenses, notably involving Alexandre Vinokourov in 2007 but none of the current
members. With that, the Tour organizers hope, the message is clear: we're back,
and we're drug-free.

So far this year, three riders have been eliminated for drug-related offenses:
Manuel "Triki" Beltrán, the veteran Spaniard riding for Liquigas; Moisés Dueñas
Nevado of Barloworld, who just cost his young team their sponsorship by breaking
the sponsor's zero-tolerance policy; and Riccardo Riccò, whose high-profile
detention prompted the entire Saunier Duval team to a hasty withdrawal from the
race. All three tested positive for EPO (erythropoletin), a hormone that
stimulates production of red blood cells, but Riccò was found to have used a
"third-generation" strain of the drug. Unfortunately for Riccò, the World
Anti-Doping Agency already knew about it and had developed a third-generation
test.

In the old Tour, nobody talked about drugs. In the not-so-old Tour, the mid-
to late '90s, the original heyday of EPO, guys like Christophe Moreau, Frankie
Andreu and David Millar confessed to drug use and opened the first fissures in
cycling's insular culture. In the new Tour, Millar is a leader of
Garmin-Chipotle, the poster team for clean cycling, which he calls "the future
of the sport." This year, the peloton has undergone some 3,000 doping controls,
compared to 300 in 2006, according to Team Columbia manager Bob Stapleton.
Retribution is swift and total for any rider guilty of transgression: handcuffs,
police custody, a possible prison sentence for possession of illegal substances.

The image of Triki Beltrán, a rider who did three Tours of duty for Lance
Armstrong, partially obscured in the back of a police car is a reminder of just
how the Tour has gone about renouncing its former self. Phasing out drugs is
noble and necessary, better for the riders and better for the sport. But the
Tour seems unable to make the transition without also making spectacle out of
the riders' disgrace. Each of the indicted riders this year quit the Tour under
a formidable police escort and may be sentenced to at least two, and up to five,
years in prison. The 24-year-old Riccò, like his compatriot Cristian Moreni, who
was hauled off the 2007 Tour, has already had to spend the night in jail.

Complicit in this portrayal of doped riders as moral degenerates and menaces
to society are the journalists who cover the Tour. For the mainstream press the
spectacle easily takes precedence over the sport, and the idea of a guy taking a
bike around France over mountain passes that only weeks ago were buried in snow
does not register as inherently fantastical. The Los Angeles Times has already
wondered if this year's race might be another "Tour de Dope." The 2007 Tour's
frenzied witch hunt was fed in no small part by Le Monde, the French daily,
flush with suspicion of the new yellow jersey.

Whatever the depth of corruption in the sport, from the 1998 Festina Affair to
the 2006 Operación Puerto, the two greatest drug busts in the history of
cycling, the riders remain the most visible accomplices. (The preeminent Festina
team rocked the entire sport when customs officials stopped a team car loaded
with dope, syringes, and other paraphernalia. Operación Puerto uncovered the
dealings of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes with dozens of top cyclists, after
a raid of his collection of doctored blood.) These two events transformed the
Tour not by exposing the underside of the professional peloton but by revealing
a deeper truth: that no outsider knows what goes into the Tour. Suddenly,
general understanding of the sport became contingent upon a single unanswerable
question: do they or don't they? This is where the old Tour lies abandoned--the
Tour of Coppi and Bobet, Anquetil and Poulidor, Hinault and LeMond, Armstrong
and Ullrich--replaced by one less concerned with the stories of its riders than
the campaign against dope.

The scuffling of the last ten years has cost the Tour dearly. As the race
nears its end, what matters is not whether the anti-doping authorities will
catch every scofflaw but whether the Tour will maintain its own narrative as one
of the world's premier athletic events. That story is still one for the ages.
The Tour won't be itself until Lance Armstrong has a true successor--someone who
wins and keeps yellow, and returns to defend it. Until then, the advances in
drug screening can keep the show on the road, but the heart of the race will
keep bleeding on the asphalt.



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