Boyhood pursuit ends in perdition

Cycling Tour de France doping scandalJohnny Watterson on how the professional cycling game corrupts the innocent dreams of youth

You wonder what was going through the head of Floyd Landis in 1990. As the global media compiled their potted biographies of this year's Tour de France winner and now seemingly a champion loser, we learned from the BBC, Reuters and the Press Association that in 1990, aged 15, Landis bought his first mountain bike. You think of what would have been going through the mind of the young boy as he lifted his leg over the saddle of the gleaming new machine for the first time.

It is a picture of innocence and for most boys, a rite of passage, a conveyance of freedom, bringing greater responsibility but endless possibilities. The first adult bike is a stunningly simple and beautiful life-metaphor.

Somewhere along the murky road of the sport of professional cycling, Landis was perhaps corrupted, and now, probably, doleful resignation more than surprise, anger or cynicism at the resilience of drug cheats will greet cycling's lost battle with a cancer that has thrived within it.

Short of a urine specimen heist at the gates of the testing laboratory, the B sample is extremely likely to confirm what the A sample has shown, that Landis's levels of the male hormone, testosterone, were almost three times what they should have been.

From the forced labour we have had to endure reading organic chemistry books and physiology manuals in order to try and understand a little of how chemicals mess up the insides of healthy people, we now know that testosterone does not spontaneously erupt like a volcano into the bloodstream unless the athlete has a serious and previously undetected condition. Landis does not.

It is also now with greater clarity that we can look at the brief but telling cameo in the mountains that earned Landis the race. Following a spectacular collapse on the final climb up to La Toussuire, in which he lost 10 minutes to his rivals in the final 10 kilometres, the American cyclist claimed "bonking" was the reason - failing to eat enough during the stage to keep up energy levels.

Then, on the following day and obviously after a hearty breakfast from his landlady, the American managed to claw back all but 30 seconds of that lost time with a remarkable solo break, leading for 120 of the 200 kilometres to Morzine.

"I kept fighting," said Landis, "never stopped believing."

The lack of respect riders have shown over the years for their sport and the global sweep of substance abuse in other sports is becoming dangerously numbing (with the upcoming European Athletics Championships in Sweden we have another school of doping excellence; prepare for platitudes and false outrage echoing around Gothenburg as well as the denials of overly developed athletes whose fuel of choice is a vial of blood-thickening EPO or a squirt of male hormone).

And as cycling, true to its relentless ability to deliver drug cheats, is the market leader in the numbing-down of this occasionally fatal practice, vigilance and the shaming of those caught become even more important.

The frequency of doped athletes being collared and banned, only to return again to their sports and be feted like lost champions, masks much of the damage being done. How appropriate it was that Sebastian Coe railed against the inclusion of the positively tested Linford Christie in the London Olympics bid, or for him to be associated officially with British athletics.

It is surely now beyond reasonable doubt that to win the Tour de France you must be chemically fuelled.

The seven-times tour winner, Lance Armstrong, didn't use drugs. We know that because he has said it often enough in between insulting the French, who don't believe him. The venerable French sports paper L'Équipe has published stories saying that blood boosting EPO was found in his urine samples in 1999. He denies it. He lives strong. You decide.

Marco Pantani knew a lot about drugs in cycling. But the 1998 tour winner and famed climber died alone in a hotel room in Rimini from cocaine intoxication back in 2004. How profoundly sad.

The effect the Landis controversy will have on the Tour is immeasurably small because the Tour had almost nothing anyway. It is a busted flush, with no credibility to hurt.

Landis may not remember his first bike in 1990 but he must understand that cycling no longer represents the first flush of adolescent freedom but a latter day morality tale about the death of sport.