Je ne sais quoi

Deep in July, I am revelling in my favorite sporting event of the year, the Tour de France. I have tried and failed to explain my fascination before, all I can really say is that every year my interest grows with my knowledge. Despite the claims of the cynics, there is more to it than the spectacle of 180 fit men in spandex, muscles flexing in cadence (although that may be a small part of the show). It may be similar to my love of other non-team sports: I understand the fundamentals, I can do the activity myself with small effort, I understand how difficult it is to achieve excellence at the sport. This holds true for swimming, tennis, sailing, gardening (not a sport, but sometimes competitive). Anyway, we are at stage 12, and every night is 3 hours of TV watching bliss.

The only fly in my ointment, apart from a nagging guilt that I am watching so much TV when I spend the rest of the year not doing so, is the drug issue. Pro-cycling has public doping scandals with tedious frequency. The upside is that this only occurs because cycling authorities test athletes regularly and publish the results. The downside is that this testing regime has not yet dissuaded everyone from trying to dope. So we have yet another Tour where an entire team has withdrawn from the competition because their star has tested positive. Another rider was caught with chemicals and syringes in his hotel room, which is seriously blatant.

The difficulty I have with this is that I seem to be a cycling optimist: I find it very hard to believe that any rider could be so stupid as to use illegal drugs when they know they will be tested. The best riders, the ones who win points and stages, know that they will be tested immediately after the win, so doping would be stupid, illogical and nearly impossible to conceal; therefore, high profile riders who test positive during the Tour must be victims of inaccurate tests. Of course, this logic holds together only if the riders are intelligent (unproven) and know for sure that they will face regular testing that will detect whatever fancy stuff they want to use. When riders are caught, I can either believe my fantasy that the tests are bad, or that the riders are dumb, or that the riders really believe that their concoction will beat the tests. While it may be that options 2 and 3 are the most likely, I'm attracted to option 1 like a kid to cotton candy: insubstantial but delicious.

I may have to let go of my staunch belief in the integrity of cyclists (where did this belief come from? I truly don't know, and it doesn't extend to other sports- I'm talking to you, track and field and baseball), but I don't really want to. I want to keep the special feeling that I get in July, when I'm mesmerized by herculean efforts in the mountain stages, and enthralled with the mental discipline of the time trials. And I still believe in Floyd.