Riding Dirty

on Floyd Landis in the time between the A and B sample

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You know when you have a great dream, and it seems real, and then you wake up and you're confused and disappointed that your life is just your life? Imagine this happened so much that you became suspicious that everything great was probably a dream, even when you were awake. This is what it's like to be a cycling fan.

Stage 17, where Floyd Landis won the Tour de France, was totally fucking unbelievable. The tour's director called it--I'm translating from the French here, "the greatest bicycle thing ever." I'm not a scientist or anything, but having seen that ride, I'm thinking what might account for the high levels of testosterone in his body is the fact that Floyd Landis has the biggest balls in the world.

On Monday, when Landis wrapped up the tour, I was in Mexico City, driving by the Estadio Olimpico, where they held the Olympics in 1968. Fans in those bleachers witnessed one of the greatest feats in olympic history. Long jumper Bob Beamon ran down the runway, took off, and jumped for like 3 miles. The record had stood at just over 27 feet. In the words of the previous Olympic Champion, he had "destroyed the event."

The 1968 Games also mark the first time the IOC did drug testing. While there were clouds of suspicion hanging over some countries, they were just clouds then. Performances weren't suspect just for being remarkable. Beamon got to celebrate, and the cheers in the stands weren't drowned out by murmurs that his jump couldn't be possible without drugs. As a fan, you live for moments like these--when the unexpected do great things or the great do unbelievable things.

Now, the unbelievable is really un-believable. Take Paula Radcliffe. In the 2003 London Marathon, she ran 2:15:25-I'm such a geek I didn't even have to look that up. That time, if you don't know, is astonishing. Beamonesque, some called it. Seriously. They have these calculators to figure out equivalencies between men and women runners. If you plug in her time, it says that for a man to equal her performance he would need to be a car.

I think Radcliffe is clean--but there are those who don't. Not because she's ever tested positive for anything. She's just really really good at sports.

As for Landis, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The specific red flag he raised, a high testosterone-epitestosterone ratio, would do nothing for an athlete who wanted to have a great performance immediately, like his Stage 17. For that, you'd want to either dope your blood or be Lance Armstrong.

This was supposed to be the clean tour--they got rid of all the dirty riders before the race even started. The dirty riders were all the best riders--I guess the prettiest girls wear the most makeup--and fans complained that they were watching a "minor league tour." But we still watched, even without Lance. We were transported back in time, to the days of Bob Beamon in Mexico City , when you could (pretty much) trust a great feat.

After Landis' positive A-Sample, not so much. Even if his B-Sample is negative, he's gonna have a scarlet A on his yellow jersey. Maybe to believe some of these guys are actually clean is to live in a dream world. But track is guys running around in circles and cycling is just guys riding bikes up hills; the possibility of the miraculous is all we've got. And it's better than the alternative: doubting all great things. I'm staying asleep unless Landis' B-Sample wakes me up.