Much like every other cyclist who anyone’s ever heard of, Floyd Landis is in a little bit of pee-pee trouble. He tested positive for an unusual amount of testosterone, and… you know what, I just don’t care.
And it’s not because I don’t care about cycling, or that I hate the Tour de France, in fact, I actively followed Floyd’s pursuit of the yellow jersey, and I found his story to be pretty damn inspirational. And I mean inspirational in the sense that it really might have inspired someone other than me who cared more about cycling or had any kind of ambition.
Rather, here’s the reason I can’t make myself care about this: cycling is so tainted, so drug-infested, that I think you’ve just got to accept it as part of the deal. How many of the top riders were banned from this race right before it began? It just the way things are. And I’m not pointing a finger at cycling, I know other sports have their problems, with in recent cycling history, hey, the needle is there. Doping is to cycling, as ground balls are to baseball, the nickel defense is to football, or super-absorbent maxi-pads are to the WNBA. For better or for worse, it’s a part of it.
My opinion of Floyd Landis hasn’t lowered a bit. I mean, I hope he didn’t do it, but even if he did, he certainly wasn’t the only one in the field, he still beat everyone else, and he still did it with a hip that’s mangled worse than the Knicks salary cap. I’m not saying that I assumed he was dirty beforehand, but I didn’t assume he was clean, either. All I assumed was that he was a cyclist, and thus, under the cloud of “maybe/maybe not, but let’s just see who’s the fastest anyway.” It was Floyd, his comeback was still manly as hell, no matter what turns up in his urine, he’s still a bad-ass.
Maybe that’s a bit too skeptical of me, and maybe it’s not fair to put all cyclists in that same category. And hey, I’d like to believe that purity is possible in cycling, and maybe someday, that’ll be the case. But for right now, to me, believing with 100% certainty that any pro cyclist is clean is about the same as believe that Mark McGwire was clean, too.

Remember on the 72nd hole of the