Ouch

This hurts. My tour favorite is out for the most dubious of dubious reasons. I feel as though the last year of following his training, plans and successes up the mountains of Italy have been a big fat lie.

Worse, I've come to admire his DS, Bjarne Riis quite a bit. And yet, I believe, if something like this can go on under his nose then his hands aren't exactly clean either.

I found this out when I returned from my morning ride and, I think, have had some time to process it as I got cleaned up and washed my shorts in the sink.

Heroes come and go and they are rarely the men of steel we want them to be. We project some sort of purity on our heroes, and those we admire, because we want to see in them something we see in ourselves. While I may not have been able to hold Lance Armstrong's wheel up a tough mountain climb, I know that if I were in the situation I would have killed myself trying. Hell, today when I was following some poor guy up a hill and hanging onto his wheel before he left me in his dust I felt good. Partially because I did it and partially because it surprised the hell out of him.

Anyway, it's not about the rides. It rarely is. It's about the race, the human story. To see the grit and determination on the faces of riders who are giving it their all. The look of surprise and joy on a rider's face as he crosses the line at Courchevel before the giant a few seconds behind him. It's about Bernard Hinault riding with blood streaming down his face, or in a blizzard and Greg LeMond with a pound of lead in his body and 8 seconds in the bag, or Fignon laying on the Champs-Élysées having lost the Tour in the last moments of the race. History may show that those men were dirty--cycling's been dirty since the first tour when riders were throwing tacks on the road to cause flats on their rivals--but there was a spirit in their moments of glory.

There's a beauty in the ebb and flow of a bike race and there's drama in the way a complex story unfolds throughout a three-week race. I think it's the narrative of cycling I enjoy.

And still, that's not why I ride. I'll never ride that fast, that far or in Europe. I'll always be a pedal masher who refuses to wear a pro kit because he doesn't feel he deserves to. I ride because there's a moment where you cross over. Your muscles stop hurting and suddenly you feel good, you can push harder, go faster and find the outer limits of what you thought you could do. I ride because the air smells good in the morning and I like the sound of my bike as I cruise along. I ride because I like wiping road grit off my legs on wet mornings. I ride because, no matter where I'm going, it's always about the part in the middle and not the last few minutes when I sit up and get off the bike.

Better yet, I think former World Champion Mario Cippolini put it best:

"The life of a rider is filled with the small things: the perfume of the vegetation, the odor of the wet asphalt, the pollen."

I'll never wear a yellow jersey--or win any race, for that matter--nor will I ever meet any of the greats of the sport. But every morning I smell wet pavement and the ever-changing fragrancece of the places I ride from season to season.

We may ride up the same hill, you in your car and I on my bike, but when I get to the top I'll look around, take a nice deep breath into my lungs and think, "I just did that! I finally climbed that hill under my own power! My legs hurt, my lungs are screaming and I nearly red-lined toward the top, but I did it."

And I'll take a moment to think about what that means to me before I say, "I bet I can do it faster tomorrow."