The cheats are coming back

Many months ago I was blathering on about people cheating. Read it here if you want a recap.

Anyway, it's not been a good week for cheat-free news. This time it really spans the spectrum.

First is the case of Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. He won this year's Tour de France, the world's highest profile cycling event and became the first winner following the retirement of Lance Armstrong. Armstrong, an American cyclist, won the tour seven times in succession much to the chagrin of the French sports media.

French journalists freely speculate and suggest that Armstrong used performance enhancing drugs but have never been able to offer a shred of proof to back up their assertions. So although Armstrong stands judged by history as the greatest cycling champion of all time, he will always have a crowd of whispering doubters in the background.

Armstrong retired last year, quit at the top you might say, and people started to breathe a sigh of relief. Relief that at least all the slurs and assertions will stop and this year will be a clean race with a genuine winner.

That was the plan. A sting operation by the police before this year's race yielded information suggesting 17 riders were involved in doping, including two very high profile favourites to win the race. A whole heap of these guys were thrown out of the race before it even began and you would have been forgiven for having that "here we go again" feeling.

You would have been right. Four days after the tour ended and four days after Floyd Landis was crowned the 2006 tour winner, he failed a drugs test. His sample showed very elevated levels of testosterone and it just could not be explained as naturally occurring. Due process and due consideration followed and a second test was ordered on his B sample. Bad news for Floyd. He failed that one too.

He's supposed to be launching an appeal. This will drag things out for ages no doubt. It might be months before the powers that be can officially strip him of his 2006 Tour de France winner's title. This is sad. Sad and pathetic. Why does anyone bother to watch the Tour de France any more?

That was followed by two other pieces of despicable "shaping" of information.

I won't go into a whole big explanation here and have provided the links.

The first concerns a blog that seems to take the piss out of Al Gore's "an inconvenient truth" movie and his campaigning to slow and then reverse global warming. It seems that this blog is not really owned by some spotty student as it suggests. Instead when you follow the trail it seems to be heavily influenced by Exxon. Not good PR.

The second and maybe even more concerning is a story about a photo published by Reuters showing smoke billowing from a suburb of Beirut. The photo is clearly doctored and it's a really bad job. A really bad job. This is an utter joke. See the photo here and read about how it has been doctored here. What the hell are Reuters at?

Yep. The cheats are coming back.