Cycling in the courtroom...

Boy, this Floyd Landis case has turned into an outright circus. Greg Lemond, three-time Tour de France champion and VERY vocal critic of both Landis and Lance Armstrong, took the stand earlier this week and revealed that Landis' business manager attempted to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his history of sexual childhood abuse.

The sad stories continued with the testimony of Joe Papp, a relatively unknown American cyclist recently suspended for performance-enhancing drug use. What should have been a simple testament that low-dose testosterone may in fact be helpful to a cyclist in enhancing recovery from a day's ride instead turned into a sob story of how Papp couldn't keep up with the world's top athletes and caved to the pressures of competition.

Yesterday, Floyd Landis himself took the stand, and spent much of his time trying assure the jury that he had no part in his close friend attempting to threaten Lemond. What that has to do with the actual case of alleged doping is still a mystery, and the entire hearing seems to have gotten sidetracked off the main points of possible laboratory mishandlings and errors. Which ever way the USADA rules on this matter, it's sure to raise a lot of skeptics in the end, and I think Floyd's going to be dogged with suspicion and presumed guilt for the rest of his career.

This blog post pretty much sums up what the most prominent American cyclists have turned the sport into. I guess if you've got as much motivation as these guys to win the Tour de France, it's equally as easy to imagine that they must have some serious issues driving them.