The Tour de France is something I would enjoy following if I hadn't the certainty that every rider in the top 10 is uber-doped.
Cycling is one of the sports with the strictest controls on athletes and, as evidenced by the rather unspectacular character of the sport in the last few years, has been toroughly cleaned out since the depths of the 1990s.
Of course there's still some messing around, but I think the sport has never been cleaner. In the '50s and '60s amphetamines were universally present in a way EPO never really was.*
*: Which partly explains why EPO was such a treason to the core of the sport. The stuff could make any loser into a champion. Amphetamines just made sure that the best riders were able to keep up their efforts just that little longer; they didn't fundamentally alter the dynamic of a race.
You seem to know much more than me on the issue, so I have no reason to contradict you. However, it kind of disrupts interest in the competition when, every year, there is a story coming up about the winner of the previous tour having been doped. Contador, Armstrong, Schleck... Basically every main contender of the previous tours have ended up being caught. I'm generally not very interested in sports, so I'm not sure, but I doubt there are many other instances of a sportive competition where this kind of scandals erupt so frequently and systematically. Maybe that's because controls are tighter than in other sports, but in any case that kind of kills the fun.
