Long road ahead

Floyd Landis has not lost his Tour de France title, but race officials have disavowed him. (FILE/GETTY IMAGES)

Cycling's required reading list this summer is 6,000 pages of legal documents, all in Spanish. Sprinkled throughout the Operacion Puerto files are said to be the names of roughly 100 top cyclists believed to have been involved with Madrid doctor Eufemiano Fuentes , who allegedly helped them dope.

"There is no way we have the eyes to go through these 6,000 pages and determine who is guilty and who is involved in some way or another," Pat McQuaid , president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), conceded earlier this month. "There is no way we can be finished before the end of this year."

Meanwhile, with the UCI's elite ProTour already well underway, the Tour de France only six weeks off, and the Olympics on the horizon, the sport is spinning its wheels.

Clubs are suspending riders said to be listed in the Spanish documents, including defending Giro D'Italia champion Ivan Basso . Sponsors are backing away. And the French tour, the planet's most hallowed bike race, likely will have its next champion decided before its defending champion is confirmed.

"It's having a devastating effect on the sport," said World Anti-Doping Agency chief Dick Pound, whose organization is sifting through the Operacion Puerto files for evidence that could lead to suspensions.

Yet clean cyclists who want the cheaters booted out welcome the upheaval. "If in the end all this works to clean up the sport, that's better for me, better for racing, and, of course, better for the Tour de France," US rider and world medalist Dave Zabriskie said yesterday in an e-mail from Italy, where he is competing in the Giro for the Danish team CSC.

The dark cloud is hovering over cycling at a time when the spoked sport has never been more popular in America. "Membership growth is up," said USA Cycling executive director Steve Johnson. "The number of events is up. The number of clubs is up."

The federation has started a professional circuit that will crown an overall champion at the end of the season. This winter's Tour of California, won by rising star Levi Leipheimer , attracted 1.6 million spectators. A Montreal-Boston race is planned for next year. "The sport is very healthy in America and its popularity is exploding," said Chris Baldwin , who rides for Toyota-United on the domestic circuit and competed in last year's world road championships.

The Fitchburg Longsjo Classic, which will be held for the 48th time next month, has been unaffected by the professional hurly-burly. "We're really an amateur race, so in that sense we're insulated from the controversy," says Fitchburg Cycling Club president George Gantz , who describes the Longsjo as a community event. "People talk about it, it's part of the chitchat, but it doesn't affect them."

Domestic cycling, even at the pro level, is a different world from its European counterpart. In America, top riders make six figures. In Europe, they make seven. "The UCI ProTour, that's the Super Bowl of cycling," said Baldwin. "Those 20 teams are the NFL. Some of us are playing Canadian League football."

As the rewards rise, though, so does the pressure to reach into the illicit medicine cabinet. "When the stakes are high, the temptations are greater," said Johnson. "That's true in every sport."

If Operacion Puerto is any indication, the temptation has been widespread among the top riders. Clubs were so worried about a doping scandal before last year's French tour that nine cyclists, including favorites Basso and Jan Ullrich , were pulled out of the lineup. Ullrich's DNA since was found in blood bags linked to Fuentes, and Basso recently admitted to "attempting" to dope for the race.

Their absence cleared the way for Floyd Landis, whose mind-boggling comeback from more than eight minutes behind was the feel-good sports story of the year, until his doping sample came back positive. Though he has yet to be stripped of his title, race organizers have disavowed him. "For us, he's not the winner," director Christian Prudhomme told a German newspaper.

Fear of another scandal is so pervasive that the UCI has been urging teams to keep suspected dopers off their bikes, even if they haven't tested positive or their cases haven't been decided.

Before the ongoing Giro, the new Tinkoff Credit Systems team suspended Tyler Hamilton, who'd just come back from a two-year doping ban, plus Joerg Jaksche and Danilo Hondo , simply because their names have been linked to the Spanish case. Riders were held out by other teams, too. "Right now, I feel like I'm kind of in limbo land," Hamilton said on his website.

With the future of teams and events on the line, athletes' rights ("An oxymoron in our sport," said Zabriskie) have become an afterthought. "It is a risk we must take," said Patrick Lefevere , who heads the international association of professional cycling teams (AIGCP). "The ideal way would be for justice to go all the way, but it could take two years and by then our sport would be dead."

The hard line is part of the new zero-tolerance approach taken by the UCI and the big races after years of turning their heads. "The sport is paying the price for all the dishonesty and lies," said three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, after he testified against Landis in his arbitration hearing last week. "The whole house of cards is starting to crumble."

With so much uncertainty and turmoil surrounding the sport, companies have become leery of getting involved. The Championship of Zurich was canceled this year after organizers couldn't line up a sponsor. The Discovery Channel, which sponsors the team that included Basso, will move on after its contract ends this year.

"I don't see any reason to go into cycling at the moment," said David D'Alessandro , the former John Hancock chairman who signed up the firm as an Olympic sponsor. "If there's another scandal in the sport, the person who made that decision will have to trade his car in for a bike."

Cycling and doping have become so linked in recent years that Amgen , which invented the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) frequently abused by riders, decided to sponsor the Tour of California as a way of stressing EPO's benefits for people suffering from anemia.

"We're using this as a platform to educate the public," said Mary Klem , spokeswoman for the California-based firm, which insisted that the race's athletes be tested for EPO, which is banned in Olympic sports. "Our mission is to serve patients. Our medicines are vital to people with serious illnesses."

If nothing else, cyclists and their supporters are getting an advanced course in pharmacology and the sports testing process. Landis, in what's been called the "Wiki defense," posted hundreds of pages of case documents on his website, and most of the testimony in his hearing, which wrapped up yesterday, focused on procedures in the French lab where his urine samples were examined.

Yet the current crisis revolves not around lab results but the evidence collected last May by the Guardia Civil when it conducted multiple raids, seized quantities of steroids and blood packets, and arrested Fuentes and seven others. If the documents are conclusive enough, riders could be banned based on "non-analytical positives" even if they were never caught by a lab.

Though Spanish judge Antonio Serrano has asked that no suspensions be imposed until the Operacion Puerto case (now on appeal) has been concluded, WADA and the UCI contend they should be allowed to issue sanctions if they don't prejudice the court's proceedings.

Even so, the time required to sift through volumes of documents, build cases, and conduct hearings and appeals is all but certain to push any resolution into next year, which worries the International Olympic Committee.

"Their concern would be that there might be people in the Games who shouldn't be there," said Pound, a longtime IOC member from Canada, "and who subsequently will have their results negated."

Even if Landis loses his doping case, he's expected to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which could take months. "If this was a horse race, they've managed to make it an 11-month photo finish," said D'Alessandro. "People are holding their tickets, trying to figure out who won."

If Landis and dozens of riders in the Operacion Puerto case are banned, it would be the darkest hour in the sport's history. But the riders who have been craving an even chance at the starting line say it will be, finally, a turning point.

"Instead of looking at the cloud, I like to look at the silver lining," said Zabriskie, who feels the negative headlines are "a necessary evil in order to eliminate the underlying injustice. What can come out of this is a clean, healthy, and fair sport, which can only serve to strengthen cycling's image."

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.