Bike racers can be exciting, too

The Tour de France, the world's most popular rolling drug test clinic, got under way Saturday and sports fans across the United States found themselves asking the same important question: "Which one is Lance Armstrong, again?"
Armstrong, of course, is not in this year's Tour. The seven-time champion who in the later years of his career inspired Americans everywhere to at least pretend to understand things like time trials and blood doping, has retired from competitive racing. These days he's mostly known for raising money for cancer research, dating a string of increasingly hot celebrities and hanging out with Matthew McConaughey and his pecs.
Meanwhile, concave-chested men with thighs the size of maple trunks continue to pedal their way over the Alps each year in hopes of getting to wear a yellow t-shirt.
This year's Tour is filled with questions, chief among them whether any of the sport's major figures will get tossed out on his spandex-clad backside for using performance enhancing drugs or injecting himself with goat blood or whatever else it is cyclists do in hopes of making it to the finish line first. Cycling's doping problem hasn't gotten the same attention in this country as drug problems in other professional sports — apparently no legislators believe they can score points with voters by going after scrawny Europeans competing in a sport most Americans gave up on around the time they took the baseball cards out of their spokes.
It's too bad the Tour doesn't get more attention, really, because there's just as much off-the-road drama in professional cycling as there is in any of our more popular sports. Last year several pre-race favorites were booted during the race for using illegal substances. Michael Rasmussen was leading last year's Tour when his own team booted him because they discovered he'd lied about his whereabouts when he missed a couple of drug tests. There were also reports he asked a former teammate to bring him a delivery of synthetic blood that was inexplicably packed in a shoebox. Which is kind of like the Yankees pulling Roger Clemens in the middle of a no-hitter in game seven of the World Series because he lied about taking his kids to Disney World.
And we're getting excited about what songs Alex Rodriguez has on his iPod?
Floyd Landis, the American who won the Tour two years ago, had his title stripped because he was found to have used synthetic testosterone on a stage in which he made a major comeback. But he didn't go down without a fight that involved a hearing in which one of his cohorts casually mentioned that Greg LeMond, another American Tour champion, was molested by a relative when he was child. Let's see you try that on Capitol Hill, Barry Bonds.
Alberto Contador, winner of last year's Tour, and Levi Leipheimer, the American who finished third, are both out of this year's competition because they joined a team that has been linked to doping, even though none of the current riders ever has. Tom Boonen, one of the sport's biggest current stars, is also out this year because he was busted for cocaine use.
A few football players take a boat trip and it's all we can talk about for months. How badly do cyclists have to behave to get a little attention around here.
Even if cycling never catches on here as a sport, you'd think it might at least win some viewers for its court proceedings.

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