Enduring problems
Drugs, deception and greed are not new to cycling or baseball. Before the steroid era, baseball had problems with players' recreational drug use and also has endured gambling and game-fixing scandals.

The Tour de France has been plagued by doping allegations since the early 1900s, when riders consumed alcohol and inhaled ether to dull the pain of endurance cycling. In 1967, British cyclist Tom Simpson died after using amphetamines to increase his endurance. Since the mid-1990s, steroids, human growth hormone and erythropoietin (EPO) have been linked to top cyclists.

Still, cycling didn't screen for EPO until 2001 and baseball didn't start testing for steroids until 2003. Since then, the sports have taken two different paths when it comes to drug control.

Aside from the 10-day suspension of Rafael Palmeiro in 2005, baseball hasn't uncovered the rampant drug abuse among high-profile stars alleged by former All-Star Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti. But through its governing bodies, anti-doping agencies and a scandal- thirsty bike racing press, cycling has accused, investigated, suspended or coerced confessions from most of its biggest names of the last decade.

Last month, after Bjarne Riis admitted he used EPO while wining the 1996 Tour de France, officials struck his name from the race's official history, even though an official test for EPO wasn't used by the Tour until 2001.

Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour de France winner and perennial contender, was cut from his T-Mobile team in March and retired after being implicated in Operation Puerto, the Spanish blood-doping probe that led to Basso's demise and put Boulder's Tyler Hamilton in suspicion again.

Hamilton, who finished fourth in the 2003 Tour under the tutelage of -Riis, has remained under a cloud of suspicion after serving a two-year suspension for blood doping in the Vuelta a Espana. He resumed his professional career this year with the Italian Tinkoff Credit Systems team but was suspended by the team in early May because of continued links to Operation Puerto.

Armstrong, who won the Tour seven years in a row while dominating the likes of Basso, Ullrich, Hamilton, Marco Pantani and other convicted dopers, has been suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs on several occasions, but there has never been sufficient evidence for him to be sanctioned.

In 2005, Le Equipe, the leading sports daily newspaper in France, reported that six different urine samples Armstrong provided during the 1999 Tour tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug EPO when examined in 2004 by a French lab fine-tuning EPO testing.

Meanwhile, last year's winner, Landis, expects to hear soon whether he'll receive a two-year suspension for having synthetic testosterone in his body and an illegally high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. If that happens, the Tour de France likely will declare no winner for 2006.

Last week, the UCI asked all 600 Pro Tour riders to sign an anti-doping charter saying they are not involved in doping and promise to submit DNA samples to Spanish authorities investigating Operation Puerto before the start of the Tour de France on July 7.

Part of the discrepancy between cycling and baseball comes down to media coverage and how it shapes public perception, said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

There is a notion that the drug problem is much more pervasive in cycling because it's the only aspect of the sport that receives coverage in the U.S. media outside of the Tour de France, he said. But that might not be true, based on Major League Baseball's test results that suggested that 5 percent of its players tested positive for a banned substance in 2003.

"Just using that 5 percent number, you could have gone to any baseball park on any day during that season and seen someone who was cheating," Swangard said. "The fundamental difference is that media coverage of baseball tends to drown out the steroid issue. In other words, there's always more being written about the game. But in the case of cycling, and to some degree track and field when it was dealing with the same issue, the only time you ever heard about it was when there is a scandal."

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