(In the midst of this year’s doping fiasco at the Tour de France, I thought I’d take us back to LAST year’s doping fiasco at the Tour de France, and a post I wrote about the Floyd Landis debacle and the future of sports that are increasingly crippled by doping)

I remember a cohort of mine in the NBC research room at the Athens Olympics getting unreasonably irate when he learned that weightlifting was one of the sports on the IOC’s chopping block for Beijing.

“But they can’t get rid of weightlifting,” he said. “It answers man’s eternal question to himself – can I pick this thing up?”

We laughed about that with the ardor of two dudes who had been averaging three hours of sleep a night for a month.

The reason that weightlifting has been considered for removal from the Olympic program has nothing to do with its viability as a sport. As my friend so eloquently pointed out, it’s one of the truly classical events, man versus mass, as essential as sport can be.

But weightlifting has become so tainted by drug use that it’s competely lost its credibility. At every major event, winners are stripped of medals after positive drug tests. It’s reached the point where this elemental sport is in danger of extinction. In the war on drugs, drugs won and weightlifting lost.

(Above is Leonidas Sampanis, who won Greece’s first medal at the Athens Games, only to later break his countrymen’s heart when he was stripped of his medal after testing positive for excessive levels of testosterone.)

It seems that cycling now finds itself at a similar crossroads. The Beatitude of Lance dominated the cycling stories in the U.S. for the past seven years, but elsewhere in the world, especially Europe, the subject of doping is never far behind when the topic of cycling comes up. From my Olympic experience I can tell you this – in Olympic media circles, it is understood as fact that Lance doped his way to the top. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. If he were anyone else – if he wasn’t a cancer survivor with a bracelet empire, if he were just some other Texan shithead on a bike – the American media would have sold him down the river a long time ago.

Just as in weightlifting, the temptations to dope in cycling have moved beyond the realm of temptation. It’s now a question of survival, as basic as – do you want to be competitive or not?

The strange thing is that the reason we want drugs out of sports is to preserve the quixotic “level playing field,” and yet in both of these irredeemably tainted sports, the playing field is as level as can be. Everyone’s on dope. The august I-berg put it best yesterday – “so that means Lance was still better than everyone else.”

Yes it does. And that might be where we’re at with weightlifting and cycling and… shit, let’s just say it… the entire universe of track and field. It’s not an ideal situation by any means, but if it comes down to just letting the athletes do drugs or obliterating their sports entirely, I say let them eat cake.