A lesson cyclists have yet to grasp

Though Floyd Landis recently completed his suspension for doping, he maintains his innocence and denies any wrongdoing. AP Austin Murphy's Mailbag Austin Murphy will answer questions from SI.com users. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

On the one hand, there was J.P. Hayes, plumb-bobbing a putt on page B13 of yesterday's New York Times. Last November, upon realizing that he'd inadvertently played a prototype ball not yet approved by the USGA, the journeyman from Appleton, Wisc., phoned officials from his hotel room between rounds at Qualifying school to turn himself in. He was disqualified, dashing his chances of earning his Tour card this year.

Except that, once his story got out, Hayes started getting phone calls from tournament officials offering unsolicited exemptions. This week he's at Pebble Beach.

On the other hand, there was A-Rod, looking ever so slightly afraid on the cover of the current SI. After denying steroid use for years, then no-commenting our Selena Roberts when confronted with evidence of a positive test, the man who would save baseball was left trying to salvage what remained of his reputation, admitting four days later that, yes, he'd used steroids from 2001 to 2003 because, you see, "I felt I had all the weight in the world on top of me."

Performance-enhancing drugs in sports are their own kind of cancer. They rob honest athletes. They rob fans of an authentic experience. They feed a destabilizing cynicism, a reflexive skepticism that hollows out what should be transcendent moments. We wonder what we just saw.

Last Monday night I drove 40 miles to Copperfield's Books in Santa Rosa, Calif. Johan Bruyneel, the glowering Belgian whose cycling teams have provided many such moments, winning eight of the last 10 Tours de France, was signing copies of his book, We Might As Well Win. When an audience member asked him about the "mental toughness" required of great riders, Bruyneel replied that "talent is not enough. You see it all the time, very talented riders don't even make it to the [pros], because they're too talented. It's always been easy for them. When they were young, they always won easily. They got used to the good life."

Or maybe they got used to the idea of competing clean. The truth, of course, is that plenty of gifted young riders have been prevented from making it in the pro peloton not by a lack of toughness, but, rather, by a surfeit of integrity and ethics. Guys who realized after cleaning up in smaller races, after dreaming big and putting 150,000 miles of training in their legs, that they weren't going anywhere unless they were willing to "get on a program."

To be fair, cycling, more than any other sport, has taken aggressive steps in recent years to heal itself. (If governing bodies and league officials in this country went after dopers with the creativity, competence and zeal shown by the AFLD -- Agence Française de Lutte contre le Dopage -- at last year's Tour de France, we'd be much closer to solving our problems.) Many of the teams that will take the start in the Tour of California, which begins Saturday in Sacramento, supplement the Union Cycliste Internationale's testing with independent testing of their own. That includes Bruyneel's Astana squad, which includes a certain Texan racing on American soil for the first time since 2005.

The Tour of California will provide a glimpse of Lance Armstrong's fitness level two races into his comeback. "Compared to other years at this time," Bruyneel told me, "his power is better than ever." Another source close to Armstrong says the Texan's wattage is 25 percent higher than it ever has been in mid-February. But then, "he started training earlier," points out Bruyneel, who remains concerned with Armstrong's weight. "He's lean, but still heavy."

If he's to avoid the unappetizing prospect of spending his Tour de France fetching water bottles for his brilliant, young teammate Alberto Contador, the man who performed all those 12-ounce curls in retirement will need to drop some muscle weight from his upper body.

The Tour of Cali will also serve as an unofficial reunion of rehabilitated sinners. Floyd Landis (Team Ouch), Tyler Hamilton (Rock Racing) and Ivan Basso (Liquigas) have all completed doping-related suspensions. But that's not all they have in common. Each of them, coincidentally, was innocent, railroaded, the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. To this day, none has admitted guilt. In May 2005, I spent a half-hour on the phone with Hamilton, who explained to me that his positive test for homologous blood doping was probably the result of having shared his mother's womb with a vanished twin.

While I don't appreciate it when they lie to my face, I don't judge dirty riders that harshly, because I think there was a time, not long ago, when they were in the majority in the pro peloton. Faced with that stark set of options -- dope or find a new line of work -- I'm not sure how I would have responded.

I do know that I have tremendous respect for guys who were weak, who did dope, but who have since had the stones to talk about it. Guys like Frankie Andreu and David Millar show us the way forward.

They are in the minority. The same day J.P. Hayes appeared in the Times, news broke that Spanish rider Alejandro Valverde had been linked, by a DNA sample taken at last year's Tour de France, to a 3-year-old doping investigation called Operación Puerto. Valverde is reportedly indignant and denies any wrongdoing.

While I much prefer biking to golfing, I think bikers have something to learn from golfers like Hayes. They need to understand more fully that the truth will set you free.

More Cycling

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VAULT: The circus formerly known as cycling (5.28.07)