Cycling's Toughest Climb

I'm so frustrated with my sport I'm almost ready to give up on it. Who is left to root for? And how can any fan be confident that his favorite rider one day won't be exposed and make him feel like a fool the next?

Last week, Tour de Fance favorite Alexandre Vinokourov was suspended from his team for testing positive for blood doping. Last night, yellow jersey leader Michael Rasmussen was fired from his team, Rabobank, after it was discovered that he lied about his whereabouts when he missed a team-level testing well before the start of the Tour.

The upside is that these really are proactive, rather than reactive steps. Today, the tour took the yellow jersey off a man's shoulders and his team fired him without any positive test results - only on suspicion of doping. Race director Christian Prudhomme seems determined to root out dopers from his race, even if it means serious damage to the sport and the Tour. I'm glad of that, and glad that cycling is willing to take a serious PR bashing to do away with even a suggestion of doping even without any proof of it. Thanks goodness there is no players union in cycling or this would all be about legal rights to privacy and what-not rather than cleaning up the sport.

This battle can be won and here's what it'll take: It will take a Tour de France winner who everyone KNOWS is clean. Then and only then other riders will start to give up their long-held notion that you can't win the tour without doping. How can we know for sure if a winner is clean - extensive testing (already in place) and his employment by a team like Jonathan Vaughter's that is proactive and outspoken campaigner against doping. I think that'd be enough to at least make riders believe that the guy was clean.

Maybe we should have seen this coming decades ago when sports started becoming such a lucrative business. In the meantime, I guess we'll plod along up this hill along with just about every other sport on earth, hoping not to be robbed of magical moments again by someone else's paycheck, needle and poor judgment.