After the doping finds at the beginning of the tour, what cycling needed was a heroic performance to bring authenticity to the sport. We seemed to have that with the efforts of Landis. Now, Landis is under a cloud. He denies it and his mom denies it as well. When Shane Warne was caught with drugs, he said that his mom gave it to him. Landis or his mom can’t expect to beat the audacity of Warne’s statements though of course.

BBC’s Matt Slater sums up the situation well:

To say the discovery that the winner of the Tour de France may have been cheating is bad news is perhaps the biggest understatement since James Lovell told Mission Control, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Of course, Floyd Landis may be cleared, but with its credibility already hanging by a thread, the Tour needed this like a stick in the spokes.

Whatever happens and was the truth regarding Floyd Landis, the reputation of cycling, already weak, has been shaken and if new fans do not get attracted to the sport in the future, you can’t really blame them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 12:37 am and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.