i have a number of friends who follow pro cycling a lot less closely than they used to.  this is a generalization, but i think it's true that for many of them, the prevalence of doping has taken some of the enthusiasm away.  it's not so much that people dope.  in an odd way, this is not only understandable, but expected.  for many fo these guys, they are paid huge amounts of money to win races.  if they didn't do everything humanly possible to win, their employer would be unhappy.  it's sort of obvious really when you're talking about teams with 10 million euro budgets. 

look, it's not that we expect sports to be some sort of temple which cannot be fouled by dastardly cheats.  it's more the facade that's irritating.  the inevitable song and dance involved when someone wins or doesn't win, and someone tests positive or doesn't test positive.  press releases, investigations, police crack downs, publicity, rinse, lather, repeat.

but the latest developments are so stomach churning and revolting that i'm not even sure what to say.  if anything could kill people's appetite for consuming pro cycling as a sport, this might qualify.  (aside: then again, i think most people would have said that the slow motion train wreck / career trajectory of britney spears, lindsay lohan and paris hilton would have had them augering in months ago and that surely wasn't the case).  maybe our standards have slipped.  maybe we just don't care and want to watch them ride their bikes.

for me, i basically don't follow pro cycling any more.  i always found their exploits sort of super human and unapproachable.  i never had the feeling that i could aspire to that.  i appreciate it, and i love to watch people riding combatively and risking everything for a huge win.  it's really insiring.  i just think there's so much going on below the surface that it's hard to appreciate even the things that i like. 

i may not be describing this well.  let me take another swing at it.  i grew up north of baltimore, very close to the state fairgrounds.  i had some friends who used to hang around the track (horse track) and many of them ended up getting jobs working there.  I didn't work with the horses but i loved to go down and hang out and watch them run.  and in season, i used to watch the races a lot.  but as i got older, i learned about stuff that goes on in horse racing.  and then it just seemed kind of silly.  like a charade.  once you know that the fix might be in, the whole event seems like a staged farce, sort of like a set piece or illusion that penn and teller might try to pull off.  all the people up in the stands are watching, but they aren't seeing what's really happening.  there's a whole series of layers of things going on beneath the surface that are actually driving the outcome that are tranparent to them.  so i still like to watch horses run but i don't really care to watch horses race.  and it's the same with bikes.  i love to ride, and maybe even race locally.  and i thought i had a reasonable idea of the stuff going on behind the scenes in cycling as well, but this new landis stuff is just so bad.  maybe i'll regain an appetite for it later on, but i don't feel like i'm missing anything right now.

-sg