Tour de France

That Doping Thing, Again

You may not remember from this time last year, Bush, but I happen to be a big Tour de France fan. Have been since my teenage years, in the early 1950s, when the great Fausto Coppi was the Lance Armstrong of his day. So news of the doping scandal, released yesterday only hours before the start of the race, left me sad for this year's event, now bereft of most of its potential top performers: Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Alexandre Vinokurov, Joseba Beloki, Francesco Mancebo... I'll still follow the race, of course, but I'll miss the competition of those great riders.

In a way, it's no surprise. This gruelling sport--and particularly this most gruelling of all sports events, the Tour--has been plagued by rumors of doping and doping scandals for years. Lance Armstrong himself has had to fight off a campaign of not-so-quiet whispering since the days of his earliest triumph in the event. Even today, a year after his retirement, there are those who wish to unseat him from his throne: more rumors this year, and of course more denials from this cancer survivor whose performance has indeed seemed superhuman. I choose to believe him rather than his detractors, but I have to admit I have little more than choice as the basis for my belief.

Here's my take--and it may well not be a popular one: let's even out the playing field by allowing any athlete to dope up whatever he wants. Many of them will do it anyway. Those baseball heroes are turning out to have feet of... well, not even exactly good wholesome clay. If we want to make sports at least fair once again, we'll stop fussing about what these athletes put in their bodies. It may be, when they get wise to the ravages performance-enhancing drugs may cause, that they'll choose to avoid them. In any event, all will be above board and transparent. Better that, I say, than not knowing who takes what and resorting to condemnation by hearsay and rumor. Suspicion, in sports as in other fields of human activity, is far more damaging than knowledge.

You talk a good line about transparency in your own line of business, Bush. If only your actions matched your words, we would be spared the suspicion that surrounds so much of what you do. So I imagine you'll go along with me on this one: legalize all drugs in sports. Oh, and while we're at it, we might as well legalize those other drugs, too. The "war on drugs" was lost long ago. Had they been legal--and in appropriate cases available, perhaps, only on prescription--I believe many lives would have been spared, many unnecessary and costly imprisonments avoided, and many, many dollars saved.

Better, as they say, the devil you know... And, just for the record, my money is on the 26-year-old Spaniard Alejandro Valverde for the Tour. He came in fifth in today's time trial, behind Hushovd, the Norwegian; two Americans, George Hincapie and Dave Zabriskie: and Sebastian Lange, a German contender. Accuse me of unpatriotic fervor, Bush, but after seven years of American domination in the form of the indomitable Lance Armstrong, I'm hoping for a European win on the Champs-Elysees, at the end of this year's race.