NEWSWEEK's Lily Huang writes on this year's Tour de France:

A year ago the Tour de France disintegrated before it left the Alps. The presumptive winner, Michael Rasmussen, fired by his team for evading doping controls during training, lost the yellow jersey before he could finish. (Floyd Landis, who tested positive post-race in 2006 for testosterone boosts, gave up his title in a courtroom.). This year, the Tour is implementing a real crackdown on substance abuse--so far, three riders have been kicked out of the race--and fending off its troubled recent history with some serious rebranding.   

Take a look at the poster that Tour organizers have heavily used to promote the event: Front and center is a heart, tattooed onto a stretch of pavement. Inside is the inscription “Le Tour Toujours”--the Tour forever. The symbolism mimics the silent encouragement that devoted fans like to write in spray paint on mountain roads to lift the pedals of their favorite riders. The inscription makes this Tour sound like a return to some enduring essence, as though the steady purging of compromised riders over the last two years was but a nightmarish interlude.

The most extravagant bike race on earth used to be the story of men against impossibility: Charly Gaul versus the storm, Tom Simpson versus the Continentals, Marco Pantani versus the world. Now the Tour is about itself, versus drugs. Dogged by drug scandals for the last ten years, the Tour has to prove that it can recover, and still create a story that will go down in the annals of the sport. This year’s race rolled out under a new banner, but the worst hallmarks of the old--drugs, lies, and sensationalist journalism--have yet to be dropped.

Along with the general paranoia of recurring scandal is a deepening distrust of whoever is wearing the leader's yellow jersey. Last year's eventual champion, Alberto Contador, was not allowed to compete in this year's race; he and the rest of Lance Armstrong’s former team had signed with the Kazakh conglomerate sponsor Astana, which Tour organizers decided to penalize for previous doping offenses, notably involving Alexandre Vinokourov in 2007 but none of the current members. With that, the Tour organizers hope, the message is clear: we’re back, and we’re drug-free.

So far this year, three riders have been eliminated for drug-related offenses: Manuel "Triki" Beltrán, the veteran Spaniard riding for Liquigas; Moisés Dueñas Nevado of Barloworld, who just cost his young team their sponsorship by breaking the sponsor’s zero-tolerance policy; and Riccardo Riccò, whose high-profile detention prompted the entire Saunier Duval team to a hasty withdrawal from the race. All three tested positive for EPO (erythropoletin), a hormone that stimulates production of red blood cells, but Riccò was found to have used a "third-generation" strain of the drug. Unfortunately for Riccò, the World Anti-Doping Agency already knew about it and had developed a third-generation test.

In the old Tour, nobody talked about drugs. In the not-so-old Tour, the mid- to late '90s, the original heyday of EPO, guys like Christophe Moreau, Frankie Andreu and David Millar confessed to drug use and opened the first fissures in cycling’s insular culture. In the new Tour, Millar is a leader of Garmin-Chipotle, the poster team for clean cycling, which he calls "the future of the sport." This year, the peloton has undergone some 3,000 doping controls, compared to 300 in 2006, according to Team Columbia manager Bob Stapleton. Retribution is swift and total for any rider guilty of transgression: handcuffs, police custody, a possible prison sentence for possession of illegal substances.

The image of Triki Beltrán, a rider who did three Tours of duty for Lance Armstrong, partially obscured in the back of a police car is a reminder of just how the Tour has gone about renouncing its former self. Phasing out drugs is noble and necessary, better for the riders and better for the sport. But the Tour seems unable to make the transition without also making spectacle out of the riders’ disgrace. Each of the indicted riders this year quit the Tour under a formidable police escort and may be sentenced to at least two, and up to five, years in prison. The 24-year-old Riccò, like his compatriot Cristian Moreni, who was hauled off the 2007 Tour, has already had to spend the night in jail.

Complicit in this portrayal of doped riders as moral degenerates and menaces to society are the journalists who cover the Tour. For the mainstream press the spectacle easily takes precedence over the sport, and the idea of a guy taking a bike around France over mountain passes that only weeks ago were buried in snow does not register as inherently fantastical. The Los Angeles Times has already wondered if this year’s race might be another “Tour de Dope.” The 2007 Tour’s frenzied witch hunt was fed in no small part by Le Monde, the French daily, flush with suspicion of the new yellow jersey.

Whatever the depth of corruption in the sport, from the 1998 Festina Affair to the 2006 Operación Puerto, the two greatest drug busts in the history of cycling, the riders remain the most visible accomplices. (The preeminent Festina team rocked the entire sport when customs officials stopped a team car loaded with dope, syringes, and other paraphernalia. Operación Puerto uncovered the dealings of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes with dozens of top cyclists, after a raid of his collection of doctored blood.) These two events transformed the Tour not by exposing the underside of the professional peloton but by revealing a deeper truth: that no outsider knows  what goes into the Tour. Suddenly, general understanding of the sport became contingent upon a single unanswerable question: do they or don't they? This is where the old Tour lies abandoned--the Tour of Coppi and Bobet, Anquetil and Poulidor, Hinault and LeMond, Armstrong and Ullrich--replaced by one less concerned with the stories of its riders than the campaign against dope.

The scuffling of the last ten years has cost the Tour dearly. As the race nears its end, what matters is not whether the anti-doping authorities will catch every scofflaw but whether the Tour will maintain its own narrative as one of the world's premier athletic events. That story is still one for the ages. The Tour won't be itself until Lance Armstrong has a true successor--someone who wins and keeps yellow, and returns to defend it. Until then, the advances in drug screening can keep the show on the road, but the heart of the race will keep bleeding on the asphalt.