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Riding in circles Armstrong still has questions to answer about doping
Who doesn't want to buy into what would be the most inspirational story in sports -- that Lance Armstrong, the man who beat cancer as mere warmup for back-to-back victories in the Tour de France, is now the rare clean cyclist in a sport addled by drugs? I certainly want to buy in. Armstrong vaulted into contention for his third straight Tour title this week, ascending the 21 remorseless switchbacks of L'Alpe d'Huez to finish almost two minutes ahead of everyone else on Tuesday, then winning a mountain time trial on Wednesday. As he did so, it was hard not to think of his tagline in that commercial: "What am I on? I'm on my bike. What are you on?" Armstrong's blithe deflection of the question fits both his go-for-it personality and our national mood. For all our public exertions against drugs -- whether bombing coca fields in Colombia or hectoring each other to Just Say No -- Americans always seem to leave to non-Americans the job of uncovering pharmaceuticals in the games we play. It took members of the International Olympic Committee to smoke out last summer the reluctance of U.S. officials to disclose positive drug tests of American track athletes in Sydney. And it took The Sunday Times of London, on the eve of this year's Tour, to catalog the suspicions now surrounding Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service team. A glance at The Sunday Times' list shows how uncomfortably cramped the quarters inside Armstrong's inner circle have become: When they begin a descent, cyclists "choose a line" -- negotiate as short a distance as the road allows. That's how Armstrong has responded to The Sunday Times' findings, by choosing a line. He has answered with non-answers and replied to questions with beside-the-point questions of his own. Still, we're asked to believe -- we want desperately to believe -- that he's clean. Or at least that he stands, with the body he and his doctors somehow brought back to health through chemistry, four-square against the deployment of chemicals in that body, or any competitor's body, to cheat. If you're clean, you visit Dr. Ferrari -- who once called EPO "no more harmful than five liters of orange juice" -- once, and that's to tell him to get the hell out of your sport. If you're clean, drug testing isn't "the most demeaning aspect of the Tour," as Armstrong calls it in his autobiography, It's Not About the Bike; the most demeaning aspect of the Tour are those team cars that leave hotels after midnight, to stash used syringes and bloody compresses and empty vials in remote dumpsters. It isn't easy to break the omerta of drugs. A decade ago Irish rider Paul Kimmage tried to do so in his exposé A Rough Ride, only to show up at the Tour and have officials warn him that they couldn't guarantee his safety, for all the ill will he had engendered within the peloton. But Kimmage was a marginal rider. Armstrong has stature and history on another order of magnitude. If the Tour is so daunting an athletic task that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to tackle it without chemical aid, let Armstrong say so. If there really is no place in the Tour for drugs, let him tell off those who can't come close to him even by cheating. To choose either of the aforementioned courses would be Armstrong's most inspiring ride yet. I want more than anything to believe. But if you ask me what I'm on, I'll tell you: I'm on skeptoids. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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