Doping at the Tour

"It ain't cheating if you don't get caught." --Billy Martin

Yeah, but if you cheat to win, it's an empty victory. Don't believe me? Consider where Bjorn Riis kept his yellow jersey from his 1996 tour victory. It wasn't displayed in a prominent place. It was "in a box at home."

That's one reason the Floyd Landis situation bugs me. No matter what you may think about whether he doped or didn't, we will never know. The flaws in the lab's procedures and documentation shown in public by the mediation hearing make it impossible to know if he was doping and got caught or wasn't doping and his results were a false positive (remember that the 'B' sample was known to be Floyd's and the lab analyst was confirming her supervisor's 'A' result. A clear conflict of interest and poor laboratory procedure). Even if you think Floyd doped (and I don't) you have to hope he is cleared by the arbitrators. It is the right result and it just might help reform the system or at least open WADA's eyes to a problem it must fix. One of many before the Tour can recover.

"I win on my merits; my opponents win by cheating." --Mason Cooley