THIS is no longer a viable sport. I don’t think we can duck this conclusion. The likelihood that Floyd Landis, the dramatic and brilliant winner of the Tour de France, was stoned out of his head on testosterone is the final nail in the coffin. Professional cycling, of the stage-racing kind, has lost all credibility.

This year’s Tour began shortly after the Spanish drugs bust and the removal of the favourite, Jan Ullrich, by his team sponsor, T-Mobile. The entire three-week madness of the tour took place in the shadow of the scandal and overwhelming question of who’s next?

Then came Landis and his collapse, a dreadful day in the mountains in which he seemed to have lost all chance of winning. This was followed by his extraordinary recovery the next day. He was better and stronger and braver and bolder than ever. A miracle! You didn’t need a pathologically suspicious nature to say to yourself Hallo? Hallo? at this point. Then to say: surely not. Surely no one would be stupid or desperate enough. But Landis went on to win, then tested positive for drugs.

When any competitor takes drugs, it is a blow to the event and the sport. When the winner gets caught, the whole damn thing becomes meaningless. For the followers of the sport, three weeks of life have been invalidated; three weeks’ investment of time and energy and enthusiasm. For nothing.

And it seems to me that the sport will never recover. The Tour de France increasingly looks like an event that is impossible without drugs. It seems that the drugging is institutionalised, accepted, ineradicable. As a result, the doings of its cyclists are less and less enthralling, for the fact is that people don’t want to watch sporting events contested by drug-users. That is why the war on drugs in sport has been so intense; not because drugging is immoral but because it is unacceptable to the punters.

Cycling is increasingly looking like the first sport that will die of drugs. Swimming has struggled. Athletics has lost acres of ground and is becoming a once-every-four-years sport for many. Public interest has been eroded by the relentlessness of the drug busts.

But the situation in cycling is unquestionably worse. The entire meaning and point of the sport have been taken away by one positive test after another. Accusations of drug use have pursued Lance Armstrong, the extraordinary seven-times Tour winner, for years, though he vehemently denies them and has never tested positive.

The entire mood of the sport is who’s on what, who’s been caught and who has yet to be caught. The sport has lost its seriousness. It continues only as a sporting sham. If cycling were a national daily newspaper, it would be the Daily Sport: past all serious credence. Elvis found on the moon, Fred Archer gives racing tips from beyond the grave, Floyd Landis wins the Tour de France. Each story as meaningful as the other, each exhibiting the same touching faith in the gullibility of the public.

Or is that a total contempt? A feeling that honesty is all out of fashion, that people just want a good show, that the public will take anything? Either way, this is the sport that has taken an overdose of drugs and, as a result, discovered that drugs aren’t nearly as much fun as expected.

The British have never cared for road racing in the way that the French do. For us, the sport will be easy to forget about, but its place in French culture will ensure that it staggers onwards for a few years at least. The Tour starts next year in Britain, so get ready for the next bout of scandal. That’s not cynicism, that’s statistics.

How much longer can the Tour carry on? How much appetite has the public for the sport of “let’s clink syringes and may the best junkie win”? Less, I would suggest, and less. How many sponsors want to be associated with the next bust? How many television companies will pay for the Lycra Drug Fiends On Wheels?

This is a sport in terminal decline and denial. The sport is like the legend of the last words of Tommy Simpson, who died of drugs on Mont Ventoux in the Tour of 1967. “Put me back on my bike,” he said. He was helped back on board, rode a few yards, collapsed and died.

Miracle turns into same old story

SO THE “Miracle of Morzine” was not all it seemed. In a race that began blighted by scandal, what might have possessed any rider to play Russian roulette with the ever-more exacting doping controls of the Tour?

Floyd Landis’s overnight transformation in the Alpine stages was remarkable. After the sixteenth stage to La Toussuire he was a broken athlete, his delusions cruelly shattered by the mountains. Less than 24 hours later, he was a colossus chased by an incredulous peloton — but can testosterone, which the American is alleged to have taken, do this?

The answer is — possibly. In Cycling News this month, Kurt Moosburger, a German doctor, said that it can aid muscle recovery. “You put a standard testosterone patch used for male hormone replacement therapy on your scrotum and leave it for about six hours,” he said. “The dose is not sufficient to produce a positive urine result in the doping test, but the body recovers faster.”

After hailing Landis’s performances, yesterday’s news has only further alienated and bemused a diminishing fan base who have now seen a generation of champions — Virenque, Hamilton, Pantani, Ullrich and Millar — fall from grace.

Raised to know right from wrong

THE quiet son of a strict Mennonite Christian family from Pennsylvania, Floyd Landis got his first mountain bike at 15 but was not allowed to ride it with shorts and had to wear a tracksuit.

To pursue his passion, he moved to California aged 20 but never complained about his early life. “I have nothing bad to say about my education,” he said during the Tour. “My parents taught me the values of work, courage and patience.”

In 2002 he joined the US Postal team, whose leader, Lance Armstrong, made him one of his most valued aides. Their relationship deteriorated, though, and in 2005 Landis moved to Phonak, soon proving that he had all the qualities to become their leader.

After his awesome climb to Morzine, Vicki Barringer, a fan whose family owns a bicycle shop that he frequents in his home town of Murreita, California, said: “That was one of the most glorious moments in sports.”

She was still backing him yesterday, saying: “I believe in Floyd’s capabilities and I’ll wait for the final outcome.”