Watching Damiano Cunego and Fränk Schleck lead the way up Alpe d’Huez last summer

The sport of cycling is in serious trouble.

This saddens me not only because cycling is perhaps my favorite sport both as a participant and spectator, but also because it tarnishes the memory of watching a couple stages of last year’s Tour de France. I haven’t talked about it much since the Landis imbroglio began but my opinion of Landis and the sport has been a roller coaster: from naivety, thinking they’re all innocent, to cynicism, assuming every cyclist dopes. My current opinion of Landis lies somewhere in the middle: I don’t think he’s innocent, but I don’t think the evidence is there to strip him of his title, either.

With the close of the Landis doping trial this week, a total of five German riders admitted they had used EPO in the 1990s, before tests to detect the performance-enhancing drug had been developed. Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel were two of those that came forward, and the pair starred in the documentary Hell on Wheels about the 2003 TdF. Will new releases of the DVD include some special features?

Then yesterday 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis confessed to using EPO throughout the 90’s including his drive to win the 1996 Tour de France. With Riis now a confessed doper, 1997 winner Jan Ulrich a probable doper facing charges, and Landis on the heels of a doping conviction, this means that Lance Armstrong’s TdF wins from 1998-2005 come in between the wins of three dopers. About the only thing that could top this week’s revelations would be if Lance to come forward. And that’s not going to happen. But it makes it harder to believe that all of Lance’s victories came without the use of banned substances when that has clearly been the culture during those years.

The thing that worries me the most is that nothing is in place for the situation to improve. Regular testing is expensive and self-imposed testing by teams isn’t catching on probably because teams don’t want to give themselves a disadvantage. As we saw with Landis, the system is completely corrupt, with UCI president Pat McQuaid convicting cyclists in the press before due process, and of course the catastrophes with French labs and convenient leaks to the media. Sadly, I don’t think the sport has hit bottom yet.