TV View:No wonder the French have a reputation for arrogance. If we lived in a country as beautiful as La Belle, we'd be arrogant too. As the Tour de France field left the mountains during the week and started their descent toward Paris yesterday, they whirred through landscapes almost heartbreakingly gorgeous.

What started as a dutiful stint of couch-warming became a conscious pleasure. And there was sunshine: actual, real stuff. To one marooned on a wet rock offshore, it all appeared impossibly glamorous.

The only downside was having to look at thin streaks of gristle perched on top of bicycles.

These past two decades, whispers of rampant drug use have become roars of condemnation amid dire warnings le Tour is a busted flush. Rather as with Rolling Stones tours, one becomes inured to hearing after each scandal about how this indeed could be the last time.

Credibility was waved bye-bye long ago and yet la Grande Boucle keeps pedalling. If, however, cycling does not stop for some introspective roadside relief after this week, then it really will be in sporting exile.

Only the gullible or those with a stake in maintaining the charade believed Tour 2007 was going to be clean, and sure enough the world's greatest bike race turned into la Farce.

"Not so much an endurance test as a pharmaceutical test," opined Gavin Esler on BBC2's Newsnight.

It's never good for a sport when news programmes turn a condescending eye on them, and sure enough the drugs writer James Waddington presented a view that might not be palatable but will still have to be faced up to at some stage. He dismissed the widespread view that sport has to be clean to be credible.

"It's a charming, old-world view but that is not the way it is in professional sport," he said. "That's Boys Own stuff . . . thinking in 19th-century terms . . . The fight against drugs is misconceived."

What Waddington seems to be advocating, though his nervousness on camera made his argument more meandering than it might have been, is a new "body medicine" whereby, presumably, organisers and the riders themselves would start from scratch and draw up a list of "smarties" that might more closely reflect the reality of professional cycling.

The matter had been touched on on Eurosport, when Seán Kelly was asked about the possible merits of a drugs free-for-all. Still sounding reassuringly like one of d'Unbelievables at a Munster final, the former winner of multiple green jerseys dismissed the idea out of hand.

"That's the worst scenario," he said. "People would go overboard and their health would be at risk. We know people will do anything to be a winner and that's not thinkable."

That all boils down rather nicely to the fact cyclists have to be protected from themselves.

Waddington's view gets shaky when faced with the simple reality that even if riders are allowed to inject rhino blood, there will always be one willing to go outside the rules and get hands on more elephantine gear.

That might be stupid, but stupidity is not a crime. If it were, the view of France's exquisite countryside would be unhindered by gaggles of small men on bicycles. Changing that culture will, however, mean overturning 100 years of history.

Part of the fallout of Michael Rasmussen's banishment was some fascinating detail about Tour history, one Eurosport commentator declaring, "The Tour has survived despite all the shenanigans. In the early days, riders hired thugs to set upon their rivals, dragging them off their bikes and thumping them".

Brandy was dispensed to riders to try to ease the pain of climbing mountains without the aid of engines. By the 1920s, things had moved on to cocaine.

After second World War, amphetamines were the drug of choice. Supply wasn't a problem. US Air Force flyers had used them to stay awake on bombing missions. When they ran out of cities to destroy, all those poppers had to go somewhere and gaining altitude on an Alp meant less collateral damage than dropping a load over Berlin.

"I only took them when it was completely necessary," said the legendary Jacques Anquetil.

"When was that?" they asked.

"Almost all the time," was the unashamed reply.

Anquetil is still remembered as one of the greatest champions. But his view of the Tour was determinedly unromantic.

"Do you expect us to do this on mineral water?" he once asked.

Such comments were recalled affectionately during the week. Boil it down though and the great man was cheating. What is happening now is different only in degree and sophistication.

Nostalgia cannot disguise that.