Tour de Dopage

The poor Tour de France...it makes the 1998 Festina scandal small by comparison. This time however, the "protests" from the cyclists seem to be much less strong. They must all surely look at one another suspiciously though.

Rasmussen is gone, Vinokourov gone, and their teams? At this point Rabobank is on the fence, but if they go, then so goes Denis Menchov. Vino's transgressions cost team mate Andreas Kloden a podium potential. Cofidis has pulled out because of a positive test on one of its participants. Oh la la....I just left France on Sunday and can't imagine the headlines of L'Equipe tomorrow!

What else...Germany's main tv chanels distributing the Tour cut its coverage after a revelation last week about doping by a German rider. A major Swiss newspaper has decided to cut its race coverage and only focus on doping scandals. UCI and ASO/Tour de France seem to be playing politics, of course, and the whole sport is in shambles.

I read Christian Vande Velde's post on Velonews today and he says the system is working. By that he means that the testing is catching the cheaters. Why is it then that the cheating continues? It may be working, but its destroying the sport. What sponsors are going to want to step up? Fan interest is dropping - although I have nothing scientific to back that up, its an observation. Maybe these economic impacts will have a more profound impact on doping than any attempt to stay up on doping methods will have.

What a shame, a beautiful race and truly one of the most difficult sporting events in the world. The Tour is suffering one of its worst showings ever; lets hope that Vande Velde is right and that we are witnessing the final squeezing out of all the bad apples. I am not too optimistic.