Tour de France 2010

The question I always find hard to answer is; where do you draw the line?

If we assume (as it's not that difficult to) Lance, Contador and Schlecks both cheat how far down the GC do you hit your first clean rider?
How endemic is the problem?
Does Cav EPO-help himself over the Poggio so he can chase down Haussler in the last inch?
Does Wiggins offer to declare his blood values for the last 10 years only mean his drugs are better than Ricardo Riccos?

I don't know the answer and the truth is I enjoy the racing anyway and for me a drug scandal in Le Tour always makes it better viewing.

It's a tough one. But both Astana and Saxo Bank have previous when it comes to team wide doping regimes, whereas Garmin, whilst being a relatively new team, have a very different attitude towards doping, i.e. they are vociferous in their opposition to it. I don't know if that means anything, especially when you consider T-Mobile's policy when cuddly Bob Stapleton took over, where he claimed they were clean yet they had more positives than any other team that season, leading to T-Mobile's withdrawal from sponsorship.

As for how endemic it is, I think it's much better now than it was ten years ago. The 1990s were arguably the dirtiest in cycling history where almost without exception everyone was taking the drug du jour, EPO. It's improved since the introduction of the EPO test but there are still, on average, 15-20 positives for EPO every season despite it being detectable now. This suggests to me that micro-dosing, taking it little and often, is still fairly widespread.

The biological passport is improving things further but until there is a reliable test for transfusing your own blood then some will continue to use this method. I'd suspect Astana, and the story above backs this up, and Saxo Bank of doing so.