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Saturday, Jul. 05, 2008

Tour de France has lost its luster

A year ago I wrote that the Tour de France was in such disrepute that a mob of citizens should pick up wooden pitchforks and run the scoundrels out of town.

Something must have happened in the dark of night because an entire generation of cycling contenders seems to have vanished. I hope it didn't hurt too much.

Oddly enough, the Tour de France resumes Saturday, in the Breton port city of Brest, making its counter-clockwise peregrination around that most beautiful country, featuring some extremely fit-looking riders, however anonymous they may be.

I don't think any sport has ever had such a turnaround at the top in such a short period. Absent for one reason or another are Landis, Basso, Boonen, Hamilton, Ullrich, Vinokourov, Rasmussen, Kloeden, Contador, some merely for being employed by a suspended team, others for more personal reasons.

And this does not include Mr. Lance, the seven-time champion, now taking a social whirl rather than zipping up the Alpe d'Huez. He's a totally separate category.

Contrast this generation gap in cycling with the predictability of Wimbledon, that wonderful institution that ends on the weekend the tour begins. No matter how many seeded players are announced as ”out“ on the BBC, some familiar names are always ”through to the next round,“ the veddy English phrase that never fails to delight me.

Even with retirements and upsets, Venus and Serena Williams slugged their way to the finals. Despite the drizzle of southwest London on Wednesday, Federer and Nadal made the finals, exactly where one might expect them to be.

Next year there will be a retractable roof over the center court at Wimbledon, but the drippy skies and the voice of doom over the loudspeakers, announcing the dismal forecast to the sodden outer courts, will remain a grand tradition. Plus, there will always be stars at Wimbledon.

The tour is trying it a different way — the post-celebrity age, a peloton of strangers flitting past your little pique-nique table by the roadside. After Lance Armstrong beat everybody in the pack for seven straight years, he retired, shrugging off rumors and unacceptable research tests that followed him like a malevolent cluster of slow but dogged cyclists.

In Armstrong's wake, many of the people he had beaten tested positive for one thing or another, including Floyd Landis, who won the 2006 Tour but was quickly stripped of his title.

Last Monday, Landis lost his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which upheld a ruling by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that Landis had tested positive for synthetic testosterone after his magnificent — in fact, unbelievable — comeback in the Alps in 2006.

Landis, who is suspended from cycling until 2009, continues to maintain his innocence, but he is caught not only in the lab reports but in the psychological dragnet of the last generation: too many doctors, managers, trainers, cyclists and even motorcycle messengers carting illegal doping paraphernalia.

The fault for all of this lies with the international cycling federation (UCI) and the company that owns the tour, which are currently feuding. Various sponsors and we in the news media are also guilty of not wanting to know. (See: Baseball, Steroids.)

As a consequence, many of us hardly recognize those lean bodies assembling in Brest. Last year's winner, Alberto Contador, along with Levi Leipheimer of the United States and Andreas Kloeden of Germany, are not competing in the tour because their team, Astana, is out of favor with the cycling federation.

Gentlemen, start ingesting your carbs. The cyclists could traverse the mountains and valleys and towns of La Belle France, and arrive in Paris a day late, who cares? The tour lives, perhaps less dirty.