Are They All Dirty? Does It Matter? Should We Care?

What a grand spectacle it will be! On July 7 the first rider will roll down the ramp for the prologue of the Tour de France. This year's Grand Boucle, or Big Loop, begins in London. Cycling fans are advised to focus on the pageantry of the brightly costumed athletes or on the Gothic grandeur of the Palace of Westminster, not far from the starting line. � Better that, of course, than to dwell on the grim reality that on the eve of its Super Bowl, this sport finds itself at its nadir--lower, even, than it sank in 1998, when a masseur for the Festina team was caught driving a car that contained a dispensary's worth of doping products. The Tour de Dopage, as the '98 race came to be called, pulled back the curtain on a sport gone horrifically awry, with riders pooling their earnings for black-market purchases of EPO, amphetamines and human growth hormone, to name just a few performance-enhancing drugs.

Nearly a decade later cycling has yet to heal itself. "The current situation is worse than in '98," says three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, "for the simple reason that '98 happened and nothing has changed."

That's not entirely true. Whereas the red-blood-cell booster EPO was all the rage in the '90s, advances in testing have limited its use. Now, leading riders have turned to good old-fashioned blood doping: storing their own blood, spinning it in a centrifuge to rid it of plasma, then reinjecting the "packed" red blood cells to dramatically increase stamina. In May, Ivan Basso of Italy, the runner-up in the 2005 Tour, allowed that, yes, his was among the estimated 200 bags of blood found a year earlier in the offices of Eufemiano Fuentes, the doctor at the center of the Spanish doping investigation called Operaci�n Puerto. Basso was suspended for two years by the Italian cycling federation.

But let's not forget synthetic testosterone, a pharmacological staple of many riders--including, apparently, Floyd Landis, who tested positive for that banned hormone during his unbelievable (as in not believable) victory in the 2006 Tour. Basso's confession came one week before the start of Landis's arbitration hearing, which came to resemble a lost episode of One Life to Live. The night before LeMond was to testify about a phone conversation he'd had with Landis after the positive test, he got a call from Landis's business manager, Will Geoghegan, who impersonated a pedophile and threatened to discuss LeMond's childhood sexual abuse, which LeMond had earlier admitted, privately, to Landis. The next day LeMond recounted the conversation in his testimony, and only then did Landis, who had been present when Geoghegan made the phone call, fire him. (The arbitrators have yet to rule on whether to uphold the positive test and strip Landis--who has vehemently proclaimed his innocence--of his Tour title.)

A week after that surreal scene, Danish hero Bjarne Riis admitted that he'd doped to win the 1996 Tour de France. Riis, now the director of Team CSC, won that Tour riding for Team Telekom, which in 2004 became T-Mobile. His confession capped a week in which a half-dozen former Telekom and T-Mobile riders conceded that they'd doped during their careers. Not fessing up was that team's best-known rider, the now retired Jan Ullrich, whose protestations of innocence were undercut by a former Telekom trainer who told reporters in May that he'd injected Ullrich with EPO.

The Diesel, as Ullrich was known, powered his way to victory in the 1997 Tour. A year later the Tour de Dopage was redeemed--such, at least, was the popular story line--by the panache of il Pirata (the Pirate), Marco Pantani, a pure climber who scored the difficult double of winning both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Alas, Pantani died of a cocaine overdose in 2004. In the book The Death of Marco Pantani, author Matt Rendell writes, "There is incontrovertible evidence that Marco's entire career was based on [EPO] abuse."

This drug-drenched sport has been so dirty for so long that the question is no longer, Who will win the Tour? It is, Can anyone win it clean? Cycling is "reaping what it has sown," says Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency and a critic of the sport's governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). Doping, Pound asserts, has been "so endemic" and the UCI so "unable or unwilling to control it that now, every time [a cyclist] does something really spectacular, instead of celebrating it, you're left to wonder."

Pound believes the time may be ripe for, in his words, "a South Africa-type truth-and-reconciliation program" such as the one chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to heal the wounds of apartheid. "You pick a date and say, 'If you come forward before this time, say what you did, who did it, how you got it, then you are dealt with mercifully.' After the date, if we catch anybody, you're toast."

The seven years between Pantani and Landis constituted the Rule of Lance Armstrong, an interregnum of wholesome, drug-free victories. Right? Armstrong was a cancer survivor--no way he'd put that crap in his body. Would he? Of course not, he assures SI. Asked if he won his Tours clean, Armstrong replies, "Absolutely. One hundred percent. I won the Tour de France once, twice, seven times because I was the most talented person in the field. I agree there are some f------ rats out here, with all the stuff we've seen. But sometimes, people come along with 12 cylinders."

Those forceful assertions of innocence by the 12 Cylinder Man are being tested by a disturbing new book, From Lance to Landis, by David Walsh, the Irish investigative journalist whom Armstrong has called a "little troll." Such antipathy is understandable: It was Walsh's last book, LA Confidentiel, which was published in French but not English, that persuaded a company called SCA Promotions to withhold a $5 million bonus the Texan had been promised if he won his sixth straight Tour in 2004. Armstrong sued and got his money--plus $2.5 million in punitive damages. But the confidential depositions in that case, widely leaked, gave Walsh a rich source of grist for this latest book.