Tour de France

We're now four days into the Tour de France, and the bike race has resembled demolition derby over the last three of them. Day 1 was a short prologue, unsurprisingly won by Fabian Cancellara, a Swiss time trial specialist and reigning Olympic and world champion in the time trial nicknamed "Spartacus" for his strength. More interestingly, Lance Armstrong managed to finish fourth, just slightly ahead of Alberto Contador and Levi Leipheimer, both of whom defeated him decisively in last year's final time trial.

One of the interesting things about the Tour this year is that there are four American-based teams competing in it. Last year there were two American teams, Garmin and HTC-Columbia, although the Kazakhstani team Astana, which included Armstrong and Leipheimer and was managed by former US Postal Service/Discovery Channel manager Johann Bruyneel, was a de facto American team at the time.

This year, Garmin and HTC-Columbia are back. Eight of the nine riders from Astana last year, with the lone exception of Contador, moved to the new American team RadioShack. The fourth American team is BMC Racing Team, which is owned by the legendary (in the U.S., at least) Jim Ochowitz, the former cyclist who led the legendary 7-Eleven Cycling Team, which became the first U.S. team in the Tour de France in 1986 and once featured a young Lance Armstrong.

However, the abundance of American teams hasn't created a surge in American riders. There are only eight Americans among the 36 riders on these teams, and one of the teams, HTC-Columbia, doesn't include any Americans. Garmin has three (Christian Vande Velde, David Zabriskie, Tyler Farrar), two of whom used to ride for USPS; RadioShack also has three (Armstrong, Leipheimer, Chris Horner), two of whom also used to ride for USPS; BMC has two (George Hincapie, Brent Bookwalter), one of whom also used to ride for USPS. In other words, of the eight Americans in the Tour, five of them date back to the USPS team, which was replaced by Discovery Channel at the end of 2004. That doesn't say much for young American cycling talent.

RadioShack is also a fascinating team talent-wise. There are five riders on the team who are potential team leaders -- Armstrong, Leipheimer, Janez Brajkovic (Slovenia), Andreas Kloeden (Germany) and Horner -- and only four "true" domesticques -- Yaroslav Popovych (Ukraine), Gregory Rast (Switzerland), Sergio Paulinho (Portugal) and Dmitriy Muravyev (Kazakhstan). In part, that may have accounted for the team's chaos on the cobbles today, as Popovych had to help Armstrong after he flatted, and the team's other contenders were on their own (including with their own flat problems).

But the fact that Saxo Bank was able to establish a break and time gap when Frank Schleck of that team broke his collarbone is a sort of good news-bad news scenario for the team. This is very early in the race for Andy Schleck to lose his brother, the champion of the Tour of Switzerland and a strong contender in his own right. Last year, the big break of the race came when Andy and Frank broke away with Astana teammates Contador and Kloeden ... and then Contador foolishly dropped Kloeden to knock him off the podium. There won't be a repeat of that this year.

And Thomas Frei's revelations about EPO microdosing probably mean that this year's Tour will be the cleanest yet in terms of doping. Frei also revealed something that I've assumed was obvious, although the Wall Street Journal, for one, hasn't caught on, with its gullible and foolish parroting of Floyd Landis claiming that Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel organized team-wide doping: the riders dope on their own, without their teams knowing.

That's why there is such a wall of silence -- a doping rider who tells the truth about doping is just hurting other riders (generally ones who helped him learn how to dope), not the team that dropped him. It's exactly the same as it was during the past decade in baseball and track.

But inevitably, this raises the question: did Lance Armstrong do something not permitted by the rules during his string of Tour victories? Well, obviously, he did. Why else would he have been involved with the EPO/blood transfusing Dr. Ferrari? He may have used EPO in 1999, and he may have received blood transfusions through 2004, when he broke off relations with Dr. Ferrari. But I doubt that we'll ever know for sure. One thing that I do know is that Landis' story about a fake bus breakdown id obviously false. Why? Because the bus driver would have sold the story to L'Equipe for a fortune long before now. It's not possible for a "conspiracy of silence" to extend to these non-riders, because their reward for telling is so disproportionate to the risk.

Basically, any stories that involve people other than Armstrong and perhaps Hincapie participating in Armstrong's doping program seem inherently phony. You'd think a business publication would recognize that.