It's a crazy world this thing called professional cycling. During the Tour de France, things got even crazier at the stage start in Abbeville when a Dutch newspaper broke the news that Jonathan Vaughters, the team founder of  the Garmin-Sharp team and one of the most out-spoken critics of doping and proponents for clean sport was implicated in the long shadow of the Lance Armstrong doping investigation.

In the opinion page of the the Sunday edition of the New York Times, Vaughters finally admits that he in fact used illegal procedures to maintain his career as a pro cyclist. The ironies are many: the first being that one of the most fervent and vocal critics of doping would now admit to his own use of drugs, and two, that one of his top riders, David Millar, himself an admitted and sanctioned doper, won a stage of this years Tour de France without illegal means to help.

The bottom line? Despite the widely recognized fact that the sport of cycling is finally starting to see the clearing through the forest, there are still a few tall trees yet to fall that we must deal with first. Kudos to Vaughters for his late, and no less painful, admission.

Forward!