Steroids Blog

The cycling team of Lance Armstrong and of this year’s Tour de France winner is finding it hard to locate sponsor, a fact that suggests that the sport of cycling is collapsing these days under the weight of continuing doping issues.

This team, the Discovery Channel, has been one of the cycling sports’ most successful franchises but recent doping issues in cycling has even left the otherwise optimistic Armstrong into a pessimist about short term future of the sport.

From NYTimes.com:

Many of cycling’s best riders have failed drug tests or been linked to doping in recent years, and doping issues last month all but overwhelmed the sport’s marquee event, the Tour de France. For a sport whose teams enjoy no revenue from ticket sales or television rights, the resulting publicity has started to drain its lifeblood: the sponsors that spend millions of dollars to finance the teams.

Known for the past three years as Discovery Channel and before that as the United States Postal Service squad, the team is owned by Tailwind Sports, a San Francisco-based company that is partly owned by Armstrong. The only American team at cycling’s top rank, it has been searching for a new sponsor since February, when the parent of the Discovery Channel network decided not to renew its three-year contract.

It is worth noting here that not even a single rider of the Discovery team has ever failed a drug test yet that is not sufficient to assure sponsors and avoid the doping suspicions besting the sport. This is nothing but a bad news to the fans and players.