The Shame of WADA

Do you get the impression that the World Anti-Doping Agency, the French and Europeans in general just don't want to believe that Our Boy Lance could win their precious Tour de France (OK, so it's OUR precious, too) seven times in row without cheating?

Maybe that's because since Bernard Hinault, a Frenchman hasn't been able to win the race whether he cheated or not?

Give Samuel Abt's excellent story in the New York Times a read and form your own impression of the sour grapes that continue to emerge from the WADA people and others who refuse to believe that OBL didn't dope in 1999.

"It's clearly everything we feared," WADA president Dick Pound said of a report by a Dutch investigator appointed by the International Cycling Union that appears to clear OBL of doping during the 1999 Tour de France. The report also criticizes international anti-doping authorities.

EVERYTHING WE FEARED???!!!

Does that not sound like anything someone who might be predisposed to believe OBL would say?

Where is any semblance of the benefit of a doubt?

Of innocent until PROVEN guilty?

What is wrong with these people?

Where is their sense of fairness?

Even IF OBL was to ultimately prove guilty, this whole process has been a sham. And isn't it ironic that at a time cycling may have something to celebrate relative to doping, it faces what may turn out to be its biggest scandal since Festina in 1998? You remember 1998, don't you? OBL wasn't racing that year. He had other concerns. Concerns that he champions today: the war against cancer.

Shame, shame, shame on WADA and Dick Pound.