After getting beat up in Tour, why push it?

A Lance spokesperson cites “lingering effects” of hip injuries suffered in this year’s Tour de France. But if we had mounting legal problems from a widening federal doping investigation, if every time we appeared in public we would have to answer doping allegations, and if the media were hounding us for comment on doping charges … well, our hip would hurt too!

Key indicator: No tweets from Lance. Usually he’s pretty up front about something as big as withdrawing from Leadville, yet the Lance Twitter has gone dark.

Much of his public interfacing these days is being done through spokespersons, a sign of lawyerly caution.

Normally we’d give the nod to Mr. Clean, Dave Wiens, in this year’s race, since he won it six straight times before Lance’s victory last year.

But Wiens said last fall he wasn’t going to follow intense training for this year’s race. And Lance’s Tour de France teammate, Levi Leipheimer, is looking fit and ready (although doping allegations are descending on him as well).

Should be a good race. You can follow it real time here.

The allegations against Armstrong have received wide publicity, but only recently have similar charges against Leipheimer gotten similar notoriety.

Wiens will be back in the mix this year, and Lance’s lackluster showing at the Tour may provide Dave some glimmer of hope. The only problem will be Levi’s coming off a strong Tour performance.

Should be a good show, this Saturday in Colorado.

One point Joe eloquently addresses that we’ve raised repeatedly has to do with institutional barriers to exposing doping. While doping does indeed come down to individual corruption — whether it be the riders, their team managers, corporate sponsors or regulatory officials — the real motivator here is money. The doping culture isn’t based on any innate joys that come from cheating a fellow cyclist or team out of winning. It’s based on the amount of dollars at stake.

That point is well worth remembering when the urge to point fingers strikes. Big Money calls the shots in professional cycling, and all culpability ultimately resides at the door of the almighty dollar.

To the surprise of no one, former Lance teammates are implicating him in a culture of doping.

To the surprise of no one, Lance’s attorney is trying to cast Armstrong as the victim. But — no surprise here either — Joe Papp is having none of it.

To the surprise of no one, Lance himself continues to stonewall. But when he puts forward syllogisms like, “You can’t prosecute somebody for something they didn’t do — normally,” you have to wonder if he wasn’t just doping but smokin’ something as well. We repeat — fess up, Lance, and we can all move on.

A useful public service from Cozy Beehive, preserving the Floyd Landis — ABC Nightline interview before the links disappear.

And the crackdown continues on the little guys, this time Brit Dan Staite.

Our man Andy looked comfortable up most of the Côte de la Croix-Neuve, with grades reaching 14 percent and averaging out at more than 10 percent, till Contador breezily broke away and put on the big hurt. We were disappointed not to see Andy respond, but he knew he would keep the yellow jersey and may be playing a tactical game as well.

Another Spaniard — they seem to be everywhere this year — Joaquim Rodriguez, took the stage win with a final sprint against Contador. Schleck finished 10 seconds behind.

Not much of a shakeup in the leaders, with Levi Leipheimer remaining in 6th (more than 4 minutes behind) as the highest-placed American. Lance Armstrong continues to fade, finishing more than three and a half minutes out today.

Full report from CyclingNews.com.

After a tough mountains stage Tuesday, the Tour took an unofficial rest day Wednesday.

Regrettably, the peloton’s leisurely sashay through the last Alps stage came on Bastille Day. French cycling fans will have to wait till this evening for any fireworks.

No significant changes in the leader board, with our man Andy Schleck holding onto the yellow jersey in a bunch finish.

We don’t mean to be harsh. It’s been a thrash of a Tour so far. The riders that haven’t crashed or aren’t hurt have to be riding on the edge of exhaustion.

But we call ‘em like we see ‘em. And we were hoping for a better show in the final Alps day.

The single saving grace may have been the first stage win for Team Radio Shack, although it wasn’t Lance Armstrong or Levi Leipheimer who pulled it off. In a two-man sprint after a long 7-rider breakaway, otherwise little-heralded Portuguese rider Sergio Paulinho bested Vasili Kiryienka (Caisse d’Epargne) to take the stage.

The pack rolled in some 14 minutes later, undoubtedly relieved at a lackluster day in the saddle.

Full results from CyclingNews.com.

Tomorrow’s stage returns to the flatlands with only an early Category 3 climb interrupting a laid-back profile. We hope at least the final sprint provides some drama.

Random notes:

Following the lead of the mountain-biking community, Tour riders are experimenting with tubeless tires.

Much has been made of Lance Armstrong’s misfortunes in this Tour, but he can’t hold a candle to the career bad-luck leader, Cadel Evans. Evans lost the yellow jersey Tuesday, then revealed he was riding with a broken elbow suffered on Stage 8. We’ve often observed that Evans can’t seem to get a break in the Grand Tours — maybe we should revise that to “positive break.”

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Landis has for the first time fully acknowledged using performance-enhancing substances, i.e. blood doping, and says he is naming names re others’ use. The biggest on the list of course would be the King himself, Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong has been implicated repeatedly over the years, in documents, books, court testimony and by association with physicians linked to doping. But he has managed to raise enough doubts to deflect suspicion. And for the record, he has never actually been caught — or at least if he was, it was never made public.

The list of names already disclosed in Landis’ accusations, which comprise a series of emails to cycling officials, is depressing, sad and unsettling: George Hincapie, another rider considered straight and narrow. Levi Leipheimer, currently favored to win the Amgen Tour of California (where Lance is riding in his support). Johan Bruyneel, Lance’s longtime team manager and confidante, currently head of Team Radio Shack in the Tour of California. David Zabriskie, the current leader of the Tour of California. All American riders, considered all-American riders as well.

If true, Landis’ accusations mark the potential passing of an era similar to what baseball went through a couple of years ago with congressional hearings and all-star confessions regarding use of steroids. No one knows if usage has really been stopped. But the aura of sportsmanship for the “roids era” of baseball has been forever tarnished.

If there’s been a pattern to doping in any sport, it’s that athletes need assistance to pull it off. And typically the cover gets blown when someone steps forward. In Lance’s case, his inner circle has been consistently tight over the years. We always guessed his former wife would be the one to finally state the case. But Landis beat her to it. [See Joe Papp's post on this point.]

Lance has been subdued in the Tour of California and uncharacteristically muted about his racing form and ambitions so far this season. If he had any inkling of Landis’ action, it might explain his low profile. Now the cycling world will be in an uproar — the equivalent of the BP Gulf oil spill — while news media continue to probe and investigate Landis’ allegations. It will hardly be a copacetic environment for pursuing racing glory this season.

Our stance on Lance has always been that his charisma, commercial drawing power and huge international following put doping authorities in an impossible bind. Even if they did manage to test him positive, what would it mean for them to disqualify him from an event like the Tour de France? It would cost the event and the sport millions in lost sponsorships, American disenchantment, TV and media coverage, advertising and general tainting of the grand and glorious sport of cycling.

Our theory has always been that mum was the word. Now, as details emerge from the Landis confessions, we may see if our suspicions were correct.

Our hope is that Lance will make a clean breast of it and move on, so that his foundation and his worthy work all over the globe for fighting cancer and bringing fans and attention to cycling can continue without a morbid cloud hanging over it. It takes a true champion to own up to his or her faults. People like to forgive and forget, and if Lance comports himself moving forward as well as he has in the past, he can put all this behind him with an “everybody did it” defense. In that sense he can rise above Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds “syndrome” — stars who were jerks before they were accused and remained jerks afterward.

One last thing: We can only hope that Lance was clean last August when he rode away from the field in the Leadville 100 to deprive local hero Dave Wiens of a 7th straight championship. To think that Wiens, a true sportsman and humanitarian, was deprived of a legitimate win on the basis of drug cheating would be one of the more depressing circumstances we’ve encountered in our lifetime of cycling obsession.

It was that way on Bonny Doon at the Amgen Tour of California today. The riders already had several climbs and 80 or so miles under their belts. To see them pushing the tall gears up a punishing, relentless climb like “Bonny Doom” — as we called it back in the day — was an inspiration to behold.

David Zabriskie (Garmin) won in the final sprint but probably didn’t deserve it. Taking nothing away from his strategy, which obviously worked, the guy didn’t pull his share on the climb up Doon. The cameras made it clear he was dogging it, to the point of even drawing the frustration of Levi Leipheimer (Radio Shack) and Michael Rogers (HTC), his two breakmates. Perhaps the veteran was simply biding his time, knowing whoever had the gas would take the prize at the end. All three of these guys are time trial champions, so they know how to optimize energy.

Lance looked strong but not in Tour shape yet. It’s obvious he isn’t pushing the issue, mainly working to keep teammate Leipheimer’s chances alive.

Apart from that, we’re wondering what happened to our man Andy Schleck. He got dropped on the Bonny Doon climb and that was the last we heard. His name doesn’t even show up in the final GC. He can’t have abandoned? [Update: Turns out Andy had stomach problems and in any case isn't forcing the issue as he aims for Tour de France fitness.]

In any case, it was a great day of racing, marred only by the inexplicable decision of Versus to cut away from the final minutes of the stage to the useless intro of the hockey playoffs. Rude, really rude. See the VeloNews comments queue and Twitter complaints, including one from none other than Lance Armstrong.

Levi, a good soldier, was not going to win the Tour. But he could have aided Lance’s chances immeasurably by helping to control the peloton, bridge any gaps with leaders, provide moral support and otherwise work for the King while keeping putative team leader Alberto Contador in check.

Without Leipheimer as domestique, Lance is at greater risk of being isolated and even dropped by Astana if it finds itself in a dog fight on one of the tough Alps stages.

In the past, it would not have mattered as much. His team was never divided as Astana is this year, and Lance would have found other ways of controlling the pack and winning the mountain stages.

But this year, Lance needs help. I disagree with Phil Liggett’s and Paul Sherwen’s persistent chatter about Lance looking as strong as ever, never threatened or under duress.

If you watch Lance closely on the climbs, he’s out of the saddle considerably more than the other race leaders. On more than one occasion his pedal cadence has been slightly higher and out of sync with other lead riders, indicating use of a lower gear.

Riding out of the saddle could be as trivial as saddle sores or a stiff back. But it also could indicate a lack of long-climb durability. As for riding in a lower gear, that seems to me a clear giveaway.

The reason that conventional analysis and the Liggett/Sherwen observations have been left unchallenged is that Lance so far has not been tested. Astana has the peloton woefully intimidated. There’s also the strategic factor of everyone waiting for the big Alps stages to really declare their intentions.

Lance isn’t the only one who hasn’t been tested. In this edition of the Tour, everyone’s been JRA like it was a Double Century or something.

When the breakout occurs, intuition tells me that Lance will become human again. And that’s fine. He’s done a great job of riveting worldwide interest on the Tour, reviving commercial and TV dollars, and generally stirred the pot as only Lance can do. Strange as it may sound, Lance doesn’t have to win to emerge as the memorable force in this year’s Tour.

All that said, he’s going to really wish he had Levi by his side when the Cols d’Enfer loom this coming week. Alberto Contador is saying he won’t follow a Lance attack in the Alps. Translated to strategy-talk: Lance better not follow a Contador attack either. And a Contador attack is a lot more likely to happen.