Armstrong chooses a cycling team and hires a steroids czar

Armstrong's best seller

Lance Armstrong promised us that on this date he would announce the name of the team he will join in an effort to win the Tour de France one more time.

By golly, he was as good as his word. Surprise! The winner of the Armstrong sweepstakes is Astana whose director is Armstrong's pal and former director of the teams on which Armstrong rode to his seven Tour wins. The same team that recently denied he was ready to ride with them again.

But there is a twist to this story that is of some note. To support Armstrong's contention that he will be clean and free of any banned substances, the team has hired Don Catlin, a noted anti-doping expert. Catlin has credentials that no one can question but there's just one hitch in all this.

He will be an employee of Armstrong's team. Armstrong believes that Catlin is beyond reproach and Pat McQuaid who heads up the sports governing body has no problem with it.  Both those men seem to believe there would be no circumstances under which Catlin wouldn't do the right thing, even if it means outing Armstrong. Might I suggest that it takes incredible fortitude and honor not to be influenced by the marketing juggernaut that is the Armstrong cancer awareness cause? Human beings are fallible and we have seen men and women in public life fail us after we have trusted them to tell us the truth. Everyone has his price, we all know that.

I am not predicting any cheating and I absolutely do not mean to say that Catlin and Astana have exchanged winks and nods on the topic of transparency. I'm just pointing out to Mr. Armstrong that if he really wanted to give the world some reason to believe he won't get any assistance from banned substances, he might have taken a different route.

For example, hundreds of blood samples taken from Australian athletes at the recent Beijing Olympics are being stored for study in the next decade. As a member of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority said, an athlete might be able to evade present-day tests for new substances, but these samples will be kept for eight years under the presumption that testing catches up a bit late with cheating.

But hey, then Armstrong wouldn't be able to make Mr. Catlin part of his marketing campaign this summer.The cyclist's test results will be posted on the Internet. What a world.