While you were distracted by the unfortunate triad of national sports developments in the last several weeks - game-fixing, dog-fighting and, of course, Barry Bonds - the Tour de France was busily completing its annual ritual of self-immolation.

Give the French credit. They are nothing if not dogged in their pursuit of a clean Tour, and that’s not even counting the two unleashed roadside pets that managed to bring down riders in separate stages of the race. The dogs and riders emerged unscathed from those mishaps, but the Tour and some of its top names weren’t quite as lucky.

Alberto Contador, a Spaniard riding for the U.S.-based Discovery Channel team, won the race on Sunday for the very logical reason that someone had to. The three men who finally climbed the podium in Paris - Contador, Cadel Evans of Australia and Montana’s own Levi Leipheimer - finished within 31 seconds of each other. Any other year, if ever an uncluttered year should arrive, that would be a memorable outcome, a testament to three evenly matched guys who could climb, time-trial and endure. This year, they just happen to be the three guys who hung around after the cops left.

By now, professional cycling has become little more than a party joke for casual U.S. fans. But it also may have become an object lesson for other sports. This is what could happen to your little ballgame if you become too serious about putting an end to cheating.

Think the NFL and Major League Baseball really want to find a reliable test for human growth hormone? Anecdotal evidence - and the fact that neither sport tests for it - suggests that HGH is the drug of choice for those who want to ramp up their strength and endurance. It is a rock those sports are in no hurry to overturn.

As it is, the U.S. sports pay lip service to catching cheats but don’t really want to give anyone a bloody lip over it. If a rider in the Tour de France is caught boosting his testosterone levels with steroids - and, of course, that took place this year, too - he is suspended from racing for two years and fined a year’s salary. In the case of Cristian Moreni of Italy, that’s exactly what happened after the 16th stage of the race, and, as a lovely additional present, a platoon of gendarmes met him at the finish line and whisked him off for booking. The other members of his Cofidis team were urged to withdraw from the race and did so.

By contrast, Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers was caught doping with steroids last season. He got four weeks off and came back to nearly win the defensive-player-of-the-year award. He made the Pro Bowl, too, and no one so much as stifled a yawn.

So save your disdain for cycling. At least that sport is trying to get it right and undergoing continuing embarrassment while doing so.

In the last year, cycling has lost a small galaxy of its stars to doping allegations and convictions. Floyd Landis, last year’s Tour winner, still is awaiting the result of his arbitration hearing, and that probably won’t go well. Gone from the Tour this year were Jan Ullrich of Germany and Ivan Basso of Italy, two leading riders. Before it was over, Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, the prerace favorite, was bounced for the misfortune of somehow having someone else’s blood in his body. Gosh, how did that get there?

The biggest scandal arrived when Michael "the Chicken" Rasmussen, a red-headed Dane with pencil-thin arms and an amazing capacity for climbing, was fired by his team last week while four days away from winning the Tour de France.

It turned out that Rasmussen lied to his team about where he was during a three-week span in June when he missed several out-of-competition drug tests and claimed to be training in Mexico. He was, in fact, in Italy, merrily riding the hills in an anonymous black outfit and doing heaven-knows-what in the evenings. As these revelations came to light, and as Rasmussen was heckled constantly along the race route, Tour organizers leaned on the Rabobank team to pluck the Chicken, and that’s what happened. No positive tests, no smoking gun, just a guy who wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Gone. If baseball were this stringent, a visit to BALCO would have earned its stars an ejection.

So the Tour was scrubbed clean, although the memory of the stains remained. To be honest, there is no way to tell how clean it eventually became. Contador himself was initially named in the Operation Puerto investigation last year that implicated about half of Spain and caught Ullrich and Basso, as well. The doctor who ran the doping ring, keeping hundreds of bags of stored blood hanging around the office, said that Contador wasn’t involved, and the 24-year-old was temporarily cleared. Now he’s the winner of the Tour de France.

Cynics can find evidence everywhere. It is often rumored that while other countries have been serious about cleaning up, Spanish riders are still playing by the old rules. Thirteen of the top 23 finishers in this year’s Tour were Spanish. So there you go. Or there you don’t.

"Ya basta," as they say in Spain. Enough already. Let cycling and the Tour de France rest for a year. Maybe next time things will go more smoothly. After all, cleaning up a sport is eventually a beautiful thing.

It just isn’t very pretty to watch the process.

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