Le tour

This may come as a surprise to some, but while touring Scotland last month, I received an e-mail inviting me to write for a general sport website about the Tour de France. Apparently someone out there likes my style of writing and thought I might be able to contribute something. I might have done so had I actually seen any of it. Apart from the fact that I was a little occupied with seeing a beautiful part of the world that I had never previously visited, I am somewhat disillusioned with the administration of that sport, as both of my regular readers on this page would be aware.

It's a well-known fact that every sport in the world has it's doping problems, but for some reason professional cycling seems to have this policy of trying to air it's dirty laundry as much as possible. The whole business of suspending riders on 'suspicion' doesn't help much either, then we have people like David Millar who were happy to use 'the juice' in the past now coming out and whining about people who did exactly what they do. One gets the impression that pro-cycling would be better to just learn to sweep it under the carpet the way other sports have. It seems the typical TdF follows the pattern of the 'update' from Julie B that appeared in the guestbook of my own journal:

News from the Tour de France that must be passed on. A skinny guy on a fast bike was found to have elevated testosterone. He AND HIS WHOLE TEAM are out of the Tour.

The skinny guy on a light bike WHO'S BEEN WEARING THE YELLOW JERSEY FOR DAYS missed some pre race doping controls. He told his team he was off with his wife in Mexico. They just found out he was actually in Italy at the time. His team kicked him off and pulled him out of the race. At least he has a bunch of yellow jerseys as souvenirs of his visit to France!

The skinny guy on a fast, light bike who was favored to win, and who put in stupendous stages in the last few days, was found to have a healthy dose of someone else's blood in his veins. HIS WHOLE TEAM has left the race.

The upshot? The guy who'll wear the yellow jersey tomorrow (a skinny fellow, with a light bike) will have to leave the white jersey behind. Or else wear two jerseys at once. Which would be decidedly unpleasant in France in July. And probably less aerodynamic, too.

Evans from Australia is now in second, and Levi Leipheimer from the USA is in third. (Rumor has it that both gentlemen are adipose challenged, and both ride bikes made of unobtanium (a composite of fishes breath, smoke from a beeswax candle, and the sound of a cat's foot steps, bonded with an extract of shadows cast on a cloudy day.)) Both have reasonable chances of standing on the central podium in Paris. Both have ridden relatively boring, safe races thus far. No superhuman efforts have been noted. So ... the gut feeling among many is that they MIGHT be clean.

Sums it all up perfectly.