Thursday, July 26, 2007

Why Even Have the Tour de France?

                             Michael Rasmussen

As a sports fans, there are a few things that amaze me.  One is that we seem to care about the Tour de France.

Well, not really.  No one watches it.  Seriously, do you know anyone that actually gets up early to watch Le Tour on OLN....errrrr....Versus???  The thing is nearly over, and how much live action did you watch?   About as much as a blind man, most likely.

Yet we follow Le Tour with SportsCenter highlights in a "oh, yeah...that's going on" manner.  We had Greg LeMond dominating;  then Lance Armstrong's amazing streak.  We had Floyd Landis winning it last year.  If America goes off on the world stage, we do enjoy that.

However, Landis' victory is tainted with ROID allegations.  Lance Armstrong can't go a month without a French newspaper saying he was on ROIDS during his winning streak.  ROIDS have dominated the headlines at the '07 Tour....and now the leader of Le Tour has been dumped in a ROID scandal [more on that here]. 

So why do we care about this race?  And why not just have a bunch of ROIDED up people running these races?  Does it really matter if they are? 

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