THIS JUST IN

Can athletes prove they're clean? In a word, no.

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

Lance Armstrong titled his autobiography It's Not About the Bike.

That also captures the spirit of his return to bike racing, announced in early September. No matter how well Armstrong, 37, rides in pursuit of an eighth Tour de France title next year, his efforts will not be strictly about putting mettle to the pedals.

Like a lot of athletes, Armstrong has a drug problem, one that's all about perception. He's angrily and repeatedly denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs, and he's never failed a drug test. But he's the best ever in one of the dirtiest sports ever. He knows nobody is above suspicion. "The [first] year that I won the Tour, many of the guys that got second through 10th, a lot of them are gone" because of doping scandals, he told Vanity Fair. "And so I can understand why people look at that and go, Well, [they] were caught—and you weren't?"

CONTE SCOFFS AT CURRENT TESTING

Can he silence doubters now? Can any athlete convince fans he or she is clean? Armstrong is betting yes.

Unfortunately, the realistic answer in most sports—from track and field to swimming, from the NFL to FIFA—is probably no. "To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that an athlete hasn't used performance-enhancing drugs—we're not there yet," says Erin Hannan, PR director for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, who's studied performance-enhancing drugs for 28 years, is more blunt. "Not gonna happen, because of the loopholes," he says. Not only are new drugs created all the time, there's still no reliable test for that 1970s standby: autologous blood doping, the practice of withdrawing and reinjecting your own blood. Yesalis says studies show that athletes who blood-dope improve performance 5% to 15%. "So if the last guy in the peloton is the first guy to cheat, he'll win the race."

BALCO mastermind Victor Conte agrees that current drug-testing programs aren't equipped to catch cheats. "They claim to have done 4,500 tests at the Olympics in Beijing, and how many did they find? Five that were positive?" Conte says. "That's a worthless endeavor."

Still, what if an athlete wants to prove he's clean? BALCO monitored athletes' chemistry to outrun testers, so could an athlete use a BALCO-like system for transparency? "I don't think you can do it by yourself," says Conte. But Armstrong has the financial resources and motivation to take self-policing to a different level. He could go beyond mere transparency and turn himself into a chemical Truman Show. What steps could he take to become a dope-free petri dish? First, install a doper no-fly zone and steer clear of anyone who's ever been associated with doping. (His reputation took a hit in 2001 when he admitted to having worked with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor who'd assisted a rider known to have used blood doping.)

On the chemical front, Armstrong could close the biggest drug-testing loophole, what Conte calls the farce of out-of-competition testing. Antidoping authorities administer most tests during the competition season, leaving the fallow months relatively free of checkups. The problem? Conte calls the off-season peak cheat season.

So Armstrong could start, right now, giving up blood and urine daily for testing by an accredited lab. That would be a juiced-up version of the "passport" program followed by a dozen U.S. Olympic athletes, similar to programs instituted by cycling teams such as Garmin-Chipotle and CSC. He could also provide DNA samples and muscle biopsies to show that he hasn't been altered by gene therapy. And he could freeze his blood samples, so that they can be tested in the future for enhancers undetectable today.

But Yesalis says that even if Armstrong did all that, it would be hard to say for sure that he was clean: "You still don't have a test for the muscle booster IGF-1, for autologous blood doping or for new designer drugs." What's more, he argues, "taking away all that individual freedom to see who can ride a bicycle the fastest? These clowns who talk about taking muscle tissue for biopsies or having athletes wear GPS bracelets so they can be tracked—that's Stalinist. To do that for sport? It's ludicrous."

The truth? There's no way to undo 40 years of sports doping, which cast suspicion far and wide. Armstrong can try to prove purity, but here's the reality: The faithful will believe, skeptics will doubt, and others will take it all with a grain of salt, laud Armstrong for his fight against cancer and tune in to see if he can do it again. Clean or otherwise.

At the end of the road, it is only about the bike, after all.

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