I just want to revise my opinion that Lance won't start the Tour. I think that if the Federal investigation was moving more quickly and an indictment of L.A. was imminent, he would scratch for the Tour. But given the broad sweep of the criminal inquiry, and how far-reaching it is, the time line has so extended that I can't see Lance having to duck out of this year's race and he will realistically be able to finish-out the season.
I do, however, express the caveat that if the federal investigation picks up steam and the time-to-indictment is shortened, Lance won't attempt to continue competing beyond the moment when he's charged with a crime. (that sounds rather obvious, doesn't it?)
And while USADA is investigating Lance, he technically hasn't been accused of a doping violation yet, so he doesn't even have the option of voluntarily suspending himself from competition to earn credit against any future ban. For those of you not familiar with the process, in the USA once you've been notified of a doping violation (typically when your A-sample is declared positive), at any point thereafter while the case is being adjudicated, and before a final verdict is delivered, you can voluntarily remove yourself from competition and self-suspend yourself.
So in my case, I tested positive on May 7, 2006. I was notified of the positive A-sample in late-June 2006. I requested the B-sample be analyzed, a process that would eventually take months and months, but in late-July 2006 I voluntarily removed myself from competition after my last race in Italy. Thus, when my two-year sanction was announced in May 2007, its start-date was July 31, 2006 (IIRC)! I thought this was fair, since at that point during the Landis Affair, I functionally only had to publicly hang my head in shame (relating solely to my positive-test) for a year, until my sanction expired on 31 July 2008.
So I've been eligible to compete for nearly two years, but I've voluntarily continued to hold myself out of competition - while participating in both the USADA out-of-competition testing pool and the UCI's whereabouts program - to bank time that could be applied to a retroactive extension of my original sanction to reflect the additional malfeasance I acknowledged.
In all honesty, USADA was very fair to me and tries very hard to respect the rights of athletes accused of a doping violation. It's a shame that in the case of Landis, all of the protections that were supposed to apply to him were completely disregarded. I know that people have been giving the BCF a hard time for not acknowledging the suspected positive(s) that are attributed to [a] British cyclist(s) - but the good thing is that they're protecting the rights of the accused.
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