Don’t lie, you had no idea. Unless of course you accidentally saw the ticker at the bottom of ESPN or CNN mention something about a yellow jacket - and even then you probably thought it was just a story about annoying insects. As I detailed in this article, sports with individual performance in a one vs. one venue (or in the case of golf/cycling - one vs. the field of other ones) are at the mercy of individual star players who define the sport. When they are present, we all watch and love the competition. When they go, we forget the sports even exists.

Enter cycling, and Lance frickin’ Armstrong.

We all love Lance - even those of us who think he’s as doped up as Barry Bonds sulking in Ken Griffey Jr.’s house crying about Mark McGwire.  When he was in the midst of winning his 600 Tours in a row, we all watched.  Suddenly we were all wearing yellow wrist bands, and talking about the USPS in a good way.

He retired, and now we would rather have acid poured on our genitals than watch the sport, even at its pinnacle event, the Tour de France.

That event, by the way, is on right now.  Been on for a little while.  We’re actually in stage four, if you can believe it.  Its a wide open race that anyone can win at this point, but right now the leader is Stefan Schumacher of the Gerolsteiner team.  No, you don’t know who he is - don’t bother looking him up.

Its really a shame - cyclists are some of the best athletes in the world, doping or no doping - and I hate to see a sport full of guys who have a resting heart rate of like 11 beats per minute get so roundly ignored.  But alas, unless a Greg LeMond or Lance Armstrong comes along again, you and I are likely to ignore this sport long into the future.