Bicycle.net has a great update on the “clean Tour” of 2009, but as Prudhomme notes, it’s too early to declare victory. For one thing, detection techniques that today find nothing will tomorrow improve. People are looking askance at Contador, a little guy who somehow nonetheless can time trial with the best. But something about Contador strikes me as being honest. And since no one challenged him except Andy Schleck, whom I also feel is clean, then maybe this indeed was a dopeless Tour.
Time will tell. Well, time and the lab…
Bike Intelligencer 
Given that there are still people getting caught (e.g. Di Luca for CERA) and that their performance is not above the others’, and given that performance has not dropped noticeably since the recent scandals, I’m not optimistic that the Tour is clean. I’ll be really curious what the restesting of the 2008 Tour for CERA shows.
P.S.: Just saw reports that Pierre Bordry, the chief of the French anti-doping agency, thinks that there were at least 2 new drugs in play in this year’s TdF, both not yet generally available.
http://tour-de-france.velonews.com/article/96120/lab-official-still-wary-of-tour