Liars and cheats in the shadow of Lance...

On Monday, Floyd Landis takes his case before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). If found guilty, the Tour de France will officially strip him of his title from last year's race. I've been pretty vocal on this blog regarding my opinions of the accusations against him, and my belief that he's innocent. This week's revelations that the USADA directly approached Landis' legal team to give up any incriminating information they might have on Lance Armstrong in exchange for a more lenient punishment seemed to provide further evidence that this entire fiasco is nothing less than a witch hunt.

However, a couple of months ago I also put up a post about my disgruntlement with the entire suspension process following the "Operation Puerto" crackdown that forced many of the top cyclists out of the Tour de France last year. Since then, most transferred to other teams or have been forced into early retirement. At the time, I thought this was an extremely unjust way of cleaning up the sport, to equate suspicion with guilt. But maybe the powers that be aren't so petty after all, and have been right all along.

Jan Ullrich (on Lance's right in the picture), who adamantly repeated his innocence and retired from the sport in March, has since been found to be guilty by way of a DNA match between bags of blood found in the Puerto case and a sample he had released just prior to his retirement announcement. Ivan Basso (on Lance's left in the picture), after initially being cleared by the Italian doping agency, abruptly stepped down from his new position on the Discovery Channel Cycling Team upon learning that an investigation into his connections with Operation Puerto were being reopened. Shortly afterwards, he fessed up to "attempted doping" by submitting blood to the Spanish physician at the center of the Puerto scandal, although he still claims he never actually cheated during any of his races. This raises the question of why these two guys felt the need to start doping in the first place, especially after Lance Armstrong retired. My only logical conclusion would be that they were cheating all along, and sort of leads me to wonder how Lance was so dominant over guys that perhaps were doping this entire time.

This is not to say that I think that Floyd Landis or Lance Armstrong are guilty of doping. However, these recent revelations certainly plant just the slightest of doubts in my mind about the integrity of any cyclist, and certainly ruins the entire sport for me as a fan. As widespread as the illegal performance enhancements have spread to the upper echelons of the cycling world, I'm not sure how this sport is ever going to recover.