It’s easy to make fun of the Tour de France. Riders know the rules and yet they’re still dumb enough the use illegal drugs, get immediate gratification and then get caught.

And with the four disqualifications this year during the just-completed 95th edition of cycling’s biggest event, I kept getting asked (or told) the same thing in two different ways:

“Does anyone really care about it anymore?” and “Nobody cares about it anymore. They’re all a bunch of druggies.”

Well, yes, a lot of people still care about the Tour de France. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong was a global athlete whose celebrity transcended cycling.

And for mainstream America sports fans, when Armstrong retired they just didn't know any other names in the sport. But European fans know the whole peloton, and the winner of the 2008 Tour de France, Carlos Sastre, will have a difficult time not getting mobbed when he returns to his native Spain for his victory celebration.

But whether Sastre or any of the other Tour de France finishers
rode cleanly, I have no idea. I've been to the Tour de France 10 times, but not since 2006. And I still want to believe Floyd Landis, the dethroned champion that year, got screwed.

Andy Hood doesn’t know if Floyd Landis was guilty and nor does he know if Carlos Sastre is clean. Results of the Tour’s final testing have not been released.

But what Hood does have is expertise, and I defer to him. In cycling journalism, a good share of journalists are former competitive riders. Their reporting fits a category called “homerism.” They write as fans only.

Hood doesn’t write as a fan. He lives in Spain, he follows the sport full-time and he's reported on the Tour de France start to finish since the mid-1990s. A long-time friend and the European Correspondent for VeloNews, Hood has written a thoughtful, informative post-Tour de France essay entitled "Can We Dare To Believe?"

Want to know about the Tour and get a good perspective about how doping is affecting the event? Let me defer to an expert. Click on this link: Andy Hood’s Post Tour Essay.