Tour de Farce?

A bit of old news, but in the wake of the other doping scandal, I thought I'd bring up the mess that was the Tour de France this year. You had riders and teams dropping out left and right. And, of course, there's last year's flap with Landis and the lingering cloud of doubt hanging over the head of Lance Armstrong. Doping seems to be endemic to the sport.

But the many cheaters caught during this year's race are actually a good sign, I think. If there is widespread use of performance enhancers in the racing scene – and it seems there is – then there are a lot of people doing things against the rules. If you crack down, if you vigorously enforce those rules, then you're going to catch a lot of them. The wave of, as it were, drug busts is a sign that monitoring agencies are getting their act together and putting the cycling world on notice. So, there are going to be a lot of arrests this year but what matters is whether there are a lot the next year or the year after that. But cracking down now and taking the publicity hit is the next step in getting the issue under control.

It's when you have cases where there's widespread abuse but the authorities aren't doing anything about it – like in baseball – that you have a problem. Because everyone knows that people are breaking the rules and they can also see there's no consequences for it there's no incentive for them not to break the rules themselves. In fact, there's pretty big incentive to break those rules because of the success of the ones already doing it. That's, if I remember correctly, the reason Barry started juicing in the first place: he was jealous of the attention being lavished on MacGuire and Sosa as they chased the homerun record.