Lima - why bother?

I reckon that title pretty much sums up Lima, so perhaps I'll just blog the shit out of something else.

Drugs in cycling... it's all just blown up. Several former teammates of Lance Armstrong have confessed to doping and implicated Lance as the doping ringleader. You can't put all those allegations back in a box, and Armstrong's decision not to defend himself against the charges means they can certainly never be disproved. That basically means that the allegations are as good as fact in the public domain. I'm wondering what it might mean for professional cycling.

The allegations largely relate to cyclists who have retired, are retiring or have already admitted doping. The point, of course, is that all this scandal is doing is damaging the reputation of former cyclists while leaving open the (remote) possibility that the current pros are largely racing clean. I can't see how that's going to change anything.

We're supposed to believe that the current pros aren't doping because stage times are slower than years in which Armstrong was winning. That seems to ignore the fact that riders are still regularly testing positive. Just because it's not the high profile riders returning positive tests (with the exception of Contador) doesn't mean they aren't doping. In fact, you'd think it makes it more likely that lots of top riders are on something more than Gatorade - lesser riders are doping but still performing at a lower level than the top guys?

It's hard watching pro cycling in that context. Any time a new guy wins a stage or challenges for overall victories, the first thought is to wonder if they're doping. And when a whole team dominates like HTC in 2010/11 or Sky in 2012, you just wonder...

The weird thing is that the doping doesn't put me or millions of others off watching. There's some human desire to want to believe. We want the best athletes to rise above the cheats and restore faith in great athleticism, training and mental strength. And every time one of them falls, we just want the next guy to rise above it all.

It's hard to accept that your favourite riders are cheating. I've been betrayed by Vinokourov and Ullrich, just like millions of others have been let down by Armstrong and Contador (surely nobody believes the contaminated steak story?). I just hope that Evans will always remain a true example of a clean rider, because I'm pretty sure that all the other top guys will be busted before too long. Does anyone think Wiggins and Froome are clean?