Imagine Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal had been thrown out of the English Premiership before a ball had been kicked. That's the equivalent of yesterday's shock news that Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Francesco Mancebo had been thrown out of the Tour de France.
The men are allegedly implicated in a Spanish doping inquiry.
The news was a bitter blow for the Tour de France. This year's race, which begins this weekend, is the first without Lance Armstrong, who won the last seven editions. With Lance gone, everyone was awaiting a far more open race, with a new hero. Now all that anticipation has been swept away by yet another drugs scandal.
Drugs and cycling have been unholy bedfellows for decades. Britain's Tom Simpson died in the 1967 Tour after taking amphetamines. Old riders asked how anyone could win a 3,000 mile cycle race without chemical assistance. But no sport can survive when the results are under suspicion.
It's ironic that Lance's seven wins were bracketed by scandal-dominated Tours. The 1998 Tour was decimated by the Festina affair, in which team after team was withdrawn because of doping allegations and riders were dragged off to the cells. Lance's triumph the following year after recovering from cancer gave the sport a better role model. How sad that eight years on cycling is in the news again for all the wrong reasons.
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