Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Over the weekend I had a few casual conversations with people about the finish of the Tour de France. “They’re all dopers!”; “Who isn’t doping?”; and “Did you watch the drug tour?” were common catch-phrases. I even got flack from family for tuning in to Versus each evening to watch the race. It is clear that the doping scandals of 2006 and 2007 have turned off many would-be cycling fans. This brings me to the point I was trying to make in this post (albeit with sarcasm), which is that I actually think pro-bicycling is doing what other professional sports should be doing to eliminate the use of performance enhancing drugs: cheaters are being caught and clean riders are continuing to race.

My only criticisms over the way cycling handles doping cases have to do with 1) media leaks which circumvent the due process rights of the riders; and 2) casting the net so wide, or weaving the holes so small, that innocent people get caught up in what can easily become a career ending rush to judgement. Suspend or ban riders when there is clear proof of cheating, but provide the same protections that we afford common criminals. That said, here in America we seem to prefer to bury our heads in the sand (e.g., the PGA has no drug testing program whatsoever), or we just accept that doping is okay so long as the doper plays for our team (as appears to be the case in San Fransicso).

In this edition of No, Not Again. Seriously, You’ve Got to Be Kidding, Right? You’re Not?!? Oh…Great!, Vino has tested positive for homologous blood doping after winning Stage 13 of the Tour de France. No wonder Americans are turned off by pro-cycling, a once noble sport that clearly has its priorities out of whack when it comes to performance enhancing drugs. Europeans just need to learn how to look the other way or plead ignorance, a la Sargent Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes: “I see NOTHING! I know NOTHING!” You do not want to tarnish someone’s record, right?

Update: On the heels of Vinokourov’s exit are Moreni (for exogenous testosterone usage) and the malloit jaune Rasmussen (for lying about his whereabouts and missing doping control tests)! While I am glad to see dopers and cheats ejected from the sport, I do have concerns about the media leaks, rush to judgement and punishment that entire teams have to endure because of the actions of an individual.

The environment is a hot topic these days. Al Gore recently won an Oscar for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. A climate conference was held earlier this month in which scientists released their bleakest report yet on the effects of global warming. Over the weekend ABC began airing promos for its upcoming Plant Earth special. Yet for every news story about mankind’s negative effects on the environment, another article surfaces that debunks the underlying theories. This type of dialogue not only obfuscates the truth, but it causes polarization and the taking of sides. Sadly, I find myself, along with many other Christians, aligning with the skeptics, and all without any attempt at addressing the issues. We tend to be dismissive instead of dialogging.

Why is it that we North American Christians think this way? Are we so entrenched in our conservative culture that we do not want to be branded as environmentalist wackos? You would think that of all people, Christians would be the foremost champions of environmental causes. After all, is not the earth the Lord’s and all it contains? I suspect that part of the problem might be a wrong view of creation, fall and restoration. There is a “world is going to hell in a hand basket” attitude, coupled with a “God is going to destroy this ball of rock someday anyway” belief, that fuel our lack of desire to fulfill our creation mandate to tend the garden. Albert M. Wolters speaks to this in Creation Regained, when he addresses the disjoint we sometimes create in our minds between human history and God making all things new again in Jesus Christ.

…if we see that human history and the unfolding of culture and society are integral to creation and its development, that they are not outside of God’s plans for the cosmos, despite the sinful aberrations, but rather were built in from the beginning, were part of the blueprint that we never understood before, then we will be much more open to the positive possibilities for service to God . . . This does not entail a naive and starry-eyed acceptance of modern scientism, technology and capitalism — the civilization of the West is admittedly in the grip of a disastrous process of secularization, after all — but it does entail a resolute refusal to abandon our civilization to that process or to concede the point that God’s creative hand is absent in the culture-building of Faustian man. If God does not give up on the works of his hands, we may not either.

– Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained, pp. 44, 45

Wow . . . Satan’s pheochromocytomas must have been huge! (via)