Connect the Dots

With all the new talk about the Floyd interview and what that might mean there are a set of dots that I'm connecting that I'm not sure most people are. It's not a complicated line of logic to follow but it's sort of indirect.

Bill Strickland, editor something or another at Bicycling magazine, wrote a blog where he looked at all the podiums of Lance's 7 Tour de France victories and he wrote something along the lines of fine, you want to say Lance was on the juice, here's the other podiums and how many of those guys have been connected to doping so who do you give the award to? How far down the placings do you have to go before you find the first legitimate clean guy to FedEx a yellow tshirt too? His podiums here. And, obviously those are more my words than his because he gets paid to type things and I just do it because I want to.

Sticking with the same idea we make it to the 2006 Tour de France and Floyd wins, then he doesn't, and Oscar Pereiro becomes the new champion and he makes public statements about how Floyd stole his Tour de France title but Floyd says he knows for a fact that Pereiro wasn't clean either. Floyd was his teammate the year before on Phonak and witnessed Pereiro taking part in blood transfusions. Then Floyd says he talked to Pereiro before the final TT of the 06 Tour and Pereiro says he still has half a bag of blood to take. But, Pereiro says he's clean, Floyd says he isn't, you can decide for yourself who you want to believe. But, if we go by the same sort of logic that Strickland is using above, if Floyd's dirty then the next guy probably is too, so who should actually be winning the 2006 Tour de France?

This brings us to our most current doping controversy in this drama free sport. Three time Tour de France winner Alberto Contador and contaminated beef ingestion related positive. Here are the facts, the amount of clenbuterol found in Contador's system is so little that the performance boosting affects are scientifically questionable at best. Here's another fact, on that great battle to the summit of Mt. Ventoux this is past Tour de France a seemingly clean Andy Schleck had no issue matching a doped Contador pedal stroke for pedal stroke. This can only mean a few things, 1) Contador is really clean or 2) Schleck isn't so clean either. I guess it could also mean 3) Schleck is super human going uphill but sucks against the clock?

Basically, what I'm trying to say here, is all you Andy Schleck fans out there might want to keep your stones in hand before chucking them at Contador through the walls of your glass house. I know Andy Schleck is the golden boy in the media, but I'm not sure you've got to jump to too many conclusions to connect the dots in this situation. I'm not convinced that if you want to find the real clean winner of the 2010 Tour de France your search will stop at the 2nd step of the podium.

And, please don't take this as some sort of cry to give Levi the jersey. Levi used to be a guy that was good for two weeks and then dropped time like a rock in water. There's no way I believe age and experience have suddenly made him a 3 week contender. Gonna have to keep looking down the results list further than that.