Someone asked me recently about Lance's return to triathlon. I think it's great! It's certainly going to make Kona interesting this year. Here's some otherthoughts about LA. Disgraced former professional cyclist, Floyd Landis, recently admitted that he did use a banned substance when he won the Tour de France in 2006. No, really? He lost the race lead after Stage 16 when he finished over 8 minutes behind Spaniard Oscar Pereiro. The next day, Landis miraculously picked himself up off the deck, rode a 120 km solo breakaway up the mountains to win Stage 17 by almost 6 minutes and regain the yellow jersey. This would be equivalent to coming back to win a hockey game from ten goals down after the first period and losing your two best players. Landis went on to win the Tour but was eventually stripped of the title when he tested positive for EPO (a banned substance used by endurance athletes to increase oxygen in the blood). Nobody was really shocked. Cycling has always been rife with doping scandals. Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967 after taking a mixture of amphetamines and alcohol. The Tour de France in 1998 was called the Tour de Dopage (need a translation?) because of the Festina Affair. Even the greatest cyclist ever, Eddy Merckx, has had three positive doping tests. He claims innocence in all three cases but you have to wonder. What makes the Landis admission such a story is that he spent two years defending himself and racked up almost $2 million in legal fees. Why spend all that time and money when you were you were going to come clean anyway? Landis has certainly screwed himself out of any comeback to cycling. No team in their right mind would sign this guy. So, what do you do you’re your ship is going down? Take someone with you and Landis, of course, went after Lance. Lance is Lance Armstrong, 7 time winner of the Tour de France. He actually won 7 in a row but more amazingly he won them all after given less than a 50% chance of beating brain and testicular cancer. Being accused of doping was nothing new to Armstrong. How do you go from being a rider who was known more for winning one day races ( “classics”) to your death bed to winning the toughest stage race 7 straight times? Given cycling’s notorious past, he must have taking something, right? Nobody will ever know for sure but he has peed in more test tubes than the rest of us have toilets and has never had a positive test. He has said numerous times that it would be stupid of him to go from almost dying to taking performance enhancing drugs that could have the same end result. A positive test would also ruin his credibility as well as his Foundation aimed at fighting cancer. Armstrong has always wanted to be known more as a cancer survivor than a Tour winner. Given this, it would be hard to believe that he isn’t clean. Some of you regular readers may be wondering what this has to do with triathlon? Well, Lance has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2011 Ironman World Championships in Hawaii. Much has been made lately of how he will do in Kona. Armstrong was a top ranked triathlete as a teenager before turning to cycling so this will be nothing new to him. I think that given his competitive nature and his superhuman endurance capabilities, he will fare very well. Craig Alexander (current two time defending champ) has nothing to worry about but a top twenty isn’t out of the question. Just as long as he continues to do it clean. The sport I love is Hilary Duff compared to cycling’s Lindsay Lohan and I would hate to see that ever change. The only triathlete to ever get caught doping at Kona was Nina Kraft in 2004. In keeping with triathlon’s image of honesty, she admitted to taking EPO and took her punishment unlike Floyd Landis. Okay, enough of the history lesson. We have too many great athletes nowadays whose accomplishments are tainted because of doping. Even someone like Usain Bolt has to be suspected of doping because of all the sprinters who were caught before him. I am proud to say that triathlon’s doping record is very short. Besides Nina Kraft, I could only find two other “big names” that were listed as being caught for doping. So, I welcome Lance’s return to triathlon not only because it will make that race even more interesting but also because Lance fits the mould. He trains hard, he is kind to others despite reports to the contrary, and he is clean. Maybe Lance should have been a triathlete all along. Then, he wouldn’t have had to put up with the Floyd Landis’ of the world trying to drag him into their own sinking ships.