Present
The last 3 weeks has seen some of the most exciting road racing of the whole year.
Stark, steep, Spanish climbs have made for daring attacks (such as Contador yesterday) and devilish descending. And as is often the way in the Vuelta (Tour of Spain) the Spaniards are on top.
The Past
But the last 3 weeks have been about a lot more in cycling, the darker side.
The Lance Armstrong affair has overshadowed the Vuelta. Like all doping it has dragged on far longer than it should have. The problem is his case goes to the core of cycling, it implicates the governing body of cycling the UCI.
I first started watching cycling in 1997 as Marco Pantani tore up the alpine climbs of the Tour de France, 3 years later in 2000, I became a serious fan, watching the Giro, the classics and the Vuelta, via Eurosport and buying my monthly Cyclesport magazine.
Those days are tainted, no-one knows who was clean, the assumption now is that all are guilty until proven innocent.
Everyday cycling in the 90s and 00s is tarnished further. This week Jonathan Vaughters (JV), directeur sportif (team manager) for major pro team Garmin-Sharp, revealed three of his own riders (Christian Vande Velde, Tom Danielsson and David Zabriskie) doped.
Although none of these are big names outside of the cycling world, they all rode for US Postal, as did JV, who admitted doping earlier this year.
Armstrong's innocence is now as unbelievable as some of the doping excuses, such as Tyler Hamilton's chimera twin!
How could Armstrong not have been doped, but ex-team mates Hamilton, Landis, Vande Velde, Danielsson, Zabriskie, Heras, Vaughters, Andreu and others were. It seems unlikely, nay impossible.
That it has taken this long to come to these conclusions is due to what is called in cycling the Omerta - an Italian mafia phrase for code of silence.
This is what has blighted cycling for many years, and continues to haunt it. That more and more riders are coming clean about being doped, is positive, but also well overdue. Just today, Johan Museeuw, a Belgian classics champion came out about having doped, and with Tyler Hamilton's book opening the lid on doping in CSC, US Postal and Phonak, more confessions are likely to come.
Future
The consensus today is that cycling is clean, or as clean as it has ever been, this is a sport where cheating has been associated since the outset (see Maurice Garin 1904 Tour de France).
But the truth is we don't know if that is true. Yes we have the blood passport and more anti-doping controls than ever. However, the same lines were pedalled (pardon the expression) post Festina in 1997 and post Operacion Puerto in 2006, more tests, more clean riders.
The hope is that cycling is changing, but in truth this is probably only partially true. The UCI remains the governing body and still does not appear to do enough to prevent and detect doping, and if the allegations about a cover up for Armstrong are true, then the UCI has no credibility.
The problem is many of the people who were around cycling during the doping days are still around now. Bjaerne Riis, Johan Bruyneel, Patrick Lefevre all current team bosses who in someway assisted doping in their teams in the past.
For cycling to move forward it needs to truly deal with its past, and it needs to change at its heart the UCI has to be reformed.
Unfortunately now all the riders are guilty until proven innocent, not failing a test is no longer proof of not doping.
