Periscope.(news around the world)

Byline: Jack Livings, Joseph Contreras, Dan Ephron, Joshua Alston

Hopped Up and Ready to Go

In a race already marred by doping scandals, the Tour de France last week suffered what some commentators are calling a potentially fatal overdose. But no true follower of cycling's main event could have been surprised by the ejection of leader Michael Rasmussen or the pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov, nor Cristian Moreni or Patrik Sinkewitz, under a cloud of suspicion. Riders have been using illegal performance enhancers of one type or another for as long as there's been a Tour. So when race director Christian Prudhomme last week declared that his top priority was to "give the Tour de France back to the hundreds of thousands of people who've been lining the sides of the roads since the Tour began," many probably wondered what he was talking about; it never went away in the first place. In most places around the world, television viewership of the Tour is up over last year and, despite rumblings about Rasmussen's missing some pre-race checks, 80 percent of Denmark's population tuned in to watch their countryman blaze up the Alps to win the yellow jersey.

So why not let them dope? It turns out fans are increasingly blase about the issue. In a recent poll of nearly 13,000 readers by the Italian sports paper La Gazzetta, about 18 percent--nearly a plurality--said that legalizing doping was the best way to level the playing field.

Allowing drugs might take care of the fairness problem, but what about the economics? Today's cyclists compete in a world that has no value other than "performance and commercial interest," says doping historian John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "Keeping an audience is a commercial, not an ethical, ambition." Yet advertisers and sponsors need not worry. If anything, the Tour's drug problems have been good, not bad, for business. Which suggests that in cycling, as in Hollywood, the old cliche holds true: there's no such thing as bad publicity.

--Jack Livings

Trouble Up High