Hooked on Le Tour

There, I've come out and said it.

The greatest cycling race in the world gets a terrible press and most of it, sadly, is warranted.

So to admit to being a fan sounds seedy, the sporting equivalent of declaring yourself an alcoholic.

In some eyes, confessing to enjoying Le Tour is to condone in some way the drug-taking that has threatened to bring the sport to its knees. Far from it.

But, like the Olympics, any spectacular performance is inevitably tainted with the suggestion that the athlete's victory is as much to do with what happened in the laboratory as on the track.

Lance Armstrong, the greatest sportsman in my lifetime, will never get the plaudits his monumental efforts have earned. Mention his record seven successive yellow jerseys and there will be some sly dig about "no smoke without fire".

Forget he was the most drug-tested cyclist around, the critics will always point the finger by listing other far lesser champions who were found out. In their eyes, Armstrong is guilty by association simply for riding a bike too well.

Call him a superstar and these know-alls cannot wait to pounce. Particularly the French, who bitterly resent the American hi-jacking their national sporting treasure.

Greg Lemond began the US takeover and I was lucky enough to interview him during his final tour in 1994. That was when I got the bug, following this amazing race for its first week through Belgium, northern France and eventually into England.

I will never forget the buzz from standing out of the car's sunroof (normal rules of the Highway Code are suspended in the cavalcade of vehicles that precedes the peloton) as we swept towards Brighton seafront cheered on by a 50,000 crowd on the roadside. All right, they probably weren't all there to see me but it felt like that anyway What struck me was how approachable the riders were. Even the likes of Miguel Indurain, who was the Tour guv'nor at that time, and his close rival Tony Rominger would be willing to share a few platitudes with a reporting novice.

That was the year of Chris Boardman's Tour debut, which he began in record-breaking fashion by recording the quickest-ever prologue in Lille. I looked more shattered from chasing his bike 200 yards as he eased off past the finish line than he had from battering round the five-mile course in under nine minutes.

It was just as fascinating to meet some of the "domestiques", the unsung guys who pedalled day after day to protect their team leader. For these guys, success was not about stealing away to win the stage but shielding their star man from the elements and protecting him from injury in the bunch.

One English speaker began to recognise our party after a couple of days and would pop over to the bar to say hello. He would try to explain that day's tactics and forecast how they would try to ride the next morning.

His name was never among the leaders. But I did spot it in a paper a couple of years later - a performance-enhancing drug had been traced in a routine blood test.

Oh, I forgot, they are all at it But even that jolt did not cure my own addiction for Le Tour. Nor the cocaine-induced suicide of the dazzling Italian climber Marco Pantani or even the shame of last year's "winner" Floyd Landis.

Some events could never recover from the public humiliation of seeing their champion exposed as a cheat. But the Tour de France is no ordinary race.

The show goes on and today it rolls into London.

Far from killing off Le Tour, the Landis affair may have saved it. Snaring such a high-profile casualty shows the weaker-minded that drug cheats will never prosper.