Greg Lemond on the tour

The Tour de France is back on. I'll be glued to the TV for the next three weeks. Last year's tour was another disaster, with leader Vinokourov and team Atana getting kicked out for doping. Astana has been re-organized under Johan Bruyneel (and) Armstrong. Pretty much the same US Postal/ Discovery organization of old. No doubt they are now the strongest team with Contador and my fellow Montanan Levi Leipheimer. Astana had just won the Giro (tour of Italy) this spring, but they have been left out of the Tour de France due to what happened last year. It does seem a little unfair to leave them out. Armstrong talked about it in an interview with Cyclingnews. I was going to link to that but I can't find it now. He pretty much said that the organizers had it in for them, (Armstrong and Bruyneel.) It sounded plausible.

So now this year Versus network has been promoting drug free stories with regard to the tour. Lots of "human interest" stories now have to do with anti-doping. Tonight they even brought in Greg Lemond to talk for a few minutes. I wrote about the conflict between Trek and Lemond, which I sort of view as an Armstrong vs Lemond conflict. Trek bikes dropped the Lemond brand as you can read here HERE . I thought it was kind of short sighted of Trek to be very honest.

I could tell that Greg Lemond chose his words very carefully. I don't blame him. I feel the same way just talking about it. This year without Astana in the Tour I found it hard to get too interested at first, but now the Tour is on and it's pretty exciting once again. A story left to be told. I just hope there isn't another big drug scandal. I'd worry that they would just take it off of TV here in the states. I was kind of worried that they were building too much up around Armstrong and when he retired they would drop it just because he was no longer racing.

I suspect the Landis scandal actually brought interest to the sport, but something positive has to happen for cycling now,... other than a drug test.