Michael Rasmussen, AKA The Chickenshit, has been pulled from the Tour. This is an unqualified Good Thing. Adios amigo. The Tour de France has become ruthless towards doping and it is high time. While the Rabobank team made the decision to dump the Chickenshit, the decision was probably forced on them by their sponsors and the Tour itself.

All this might make for a difficult day for Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen who have done their best to ignore doping in this year’s Tour TV coverage, but for the rest of us it is cause for a cold beer (in my case two, and both free at that). There appears to be a school of thought that all of this conflict and trouble are bad for cycling and should be ignored, at least when presenting the public face of cycling. Watching this year’s Tour on TV is like entering an alternate universe where there is no doping and no one is under any suspicion. I couldn’t disagree with this approach more. What cycling needs is to air all the dirty laundry and publicly humiliate the teams and riders that have been guilty of doping. Frankness is what is needed, not cheerleading.

The yellow jersey has now gone to Alberto Contador who unfortunately turned in his own unusually good time trial and mountain performances over the last week, and he and his Discovery Channel team are hardly above suspicion in any case. He will also still have to out time trial Cadel Evans and Levi Leipheimer on Saturday, so anything is still possible. The most unfortunate aspect of all this is that the time gap Contador holds was gained in large part through his cooperation with the disgraced Rasmussen in the mountains.

This week was gut check time for the Tour de France and they came through. Far from casting a permanent shadow over the Tour the Rasmussen and Astana incidents are nothing more than a couple of clouds in the sky which have done their worst and are moving on with the first breeze. The real danger was the chance that the Tour would do nothing, and in doing so effectively cave in to the dopers. This would have been a real shadow that would have permanently relegated the Tour to the level of the WWE. Today cycling didn’t return to the darkness, it emerged from the shadows. There is still a long way to go, and it may take a new generation of riders to undo the damage this generation has done, but today was a beginning, and a very good day indeed.