Why.

I guess there's two ways to look at the latest incident of doping on The Tour.
--
It's a sign that the sport of professional cycling is hopelessly tainted and dying, soon to wither into a sideshow the likes of WWW wrestling.
--
Or it's a sign that the system is working, and the dirty riders are being culled from the peleton.

It's hard for me not to love a sport that demands this level of committment, sacrifice as well as the physical demands of speed, agility and strength.
--
Millions of others love it, too, and hope that it survives and becomes stronger. That love will help racing, and the Tour, in these bad times.
--
Here are two good antidotes to the gloom-and doom predictions for The Tour.
--
And here's something else to mull over, something that we have probably forgotten, it being so long ago. A much better known sport here in the U.S. was in deep trouble back in the Ragtime Era. Trouble so bad that the entire power structure of the sport was changed to give one man the authority to clean up the sport. And to his credit that man did, restoring the game (with a little help from a disobedient bad boy from the Baltimore slums) to the popularity it kept for half a century.
--
It's worth noting that the same sport is in trouble again - with doping.
--
But my point is that it took Kenesaw Landis more than seven years to clean up baseball, and he had to throw 19 men out of the game, many of them big stars of their day. Several others had to be warned to stop associating with gamblers, and were threatened with expulsion if they did not.
--
Cleaning up anything that has fallen into bad times and bad ways is always ugly. But for the sake of cycling I hope this latest bad news is a sign that the illness is leaving the body rather than the spirit is failing and the flesh is weak.