Le tour de ... WHAT?!?

So the annual "Tour De France" is there again. Well, we're almost half way and we still don't know who won it LAST year! That's right! I won't acknowledge this edition to be real, as cycling has lost it's last grain of dignity. Decades and books as big as the bible full of stories filled with drugs, violence, dope, amphetamines and betrayal. Sad little men who claim to be athletes, who claim to be clean,... One by one they are coming clean (pun intended) with theirselves and confess. I wonder if there's actually one cyclists around who doesn't shoot up before the competition. I doubt there is...

Last year's winner is still unknown. Floyd Landis won after a spectacular escape and took the yellow jersey. But later on he was busted. Oscar Pereiro who came in second should have been named the official winner. But the situation is unclear. Even the official website of the Tour De France remains utterly silent over the 2006 Tour.

People don't care. They like it anyway. Cycling is folk tradition in these parts of Europe. Besides football it's the biggest national passion. Le Tour is THE annual event for people, bars, television and sport fans. The media hasn't exaggerated the problems with dope during the past years, in fact they've made it seem like it's a minor problem. People seem to have the idea, because they are all doing it, it's all ok. They seem to have forgotten that it takes great achievements to overcome great barriers and that the heart of a true athlete could never beat knowing it was medically enhanced.

Athletes on dope are losers. In every sense of the word. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many athletes seem to lose control. Not only in their professional lives but also in their private life. There are stories of cyclists hooked on dope, starting to deal dope, cyclists on cocaine, cyclists commiting suicide and cyclists in jail, in psychiatric hospitals or who knows what... Many athletes suffer from a heart disease after they quit. Actually the medical conditions are too many too mention. It's been more than 40 years since Tom Simpson died on the Mont Ventoux. It's only been three and a half years since Marco Pantani died of an overdose. It's only been a couple of weeks since Frank Vandenbroucke tried committing suicide.

One can only hope that this year for all of these athletes the finish line of the Tour De France is in Paris on the Champs Élysées and not in far more darker places and circomstances.