Le Dopage

I just settled into the sofa to watch the end of today's coverage of the Tour de France - the decisive climb up the Col d'Aubisque, a mythical spot in the annals of the Tour - when the crawl at the bottom of the screen said that Michael Rasmussen, who won the stage and sealed the maillot jaune, had been kicked out of the Tour and fired from his team over vague but damning doping concerns.


C'est incroyable. It's as if a quarterback, having just given thrown a long touchdown pass to give his team the lead midway through the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, is yanked from the game, fired by his team, and run on a rail out of town. The Tour has seen a lot of low points in the last nine years (as I described elsewhere), but this is by far the lowest. Rasmussen just crossed the finish line on the recap show, and the crowd's boos were audible. 


At least now we might get a clean champion - and a meaningful last few stages. Depending on how the Tour treats the removal (the official site still shows Rasmussen in yellow) by adjusting time bonuses for stage wins and such, we should see Alberto Contador in first, about two minutes up on Cadel Evans and three on Levi Leipheimer. Evans and Leipheimer are both good time-trialers, though probably not good enough to take that much time on Contador on Saturday.

On the other hand, an article in the International Herald Tribune today by Samuel Abt, the dean of cycling journalists, had this great quote from a French spectator: "It's not the riders I care about. It's the Tour de France. The riders come and go, the Tour is forever."
July 25, 2007 9:18 PM

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.