Cycling has become a blood sport, 21st century style, and the effect is dire: those who love the sport enough to withstand its tortures for a fleeting shot at its glories are those killing it from within, virus-like.

But last year’s disgraced winner Floyd Landis and this year’s shamed leader Michael Rasmussen are only the public faces of a system that implicitly condones it. The doctors, the team management, and race controllers are all complicit to varying degrees, either by omission or commission.

If they’re not the ones with the fridges filled with blood bags, they’re the ones who fail to implement a rigorous enough testing regime.

When the red blood cell booster EPO hit the peloton in the early nineties, riders could not keep up without using it. Swiss chemists sold EPO over the counter with astronomical markups, while doctors in all the cycling countries ignored their Hippocratic oath to enhance the performance of their cyclists.

It’s a neat illustration of the cross-jurisdictional culpability: the sport’s regulators abnegated their responsibility for it, the teams used it, and the commentators became authors in Lance Armstrong’s unreal apotheosis.

If you don’t know that every corner of the sport is infected, you won’t learn it from watching the mainstream coverage. Commentary on the same performance oscillates from approbation when winning to opprobrium when the tests come back positive.

The SBS feed from the host broadcasters reflects such a dynamic, with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen waving their pom-poms until a rider fails a test. Then they become the disapproving school master. For the average viewer, the illusion is that the tests work, the cheats are caught, and then commentary resumes in full hagiography mode.

Mike Tomalaris is not well served by these poor mentors. After 12 years covering the Tour de France, he still fails to report the raw, unfiltered truth, but he’s not alone. Like others covering the sport, he’s in a bind. It’s a great story, but it will be the last one he reports. The teams and riders who make his job possible will close him down in less time than it takes to bin a syringe.

Nor do his employers want him fixating on blood science. Talk of “drugs” and “doping” is incompatible with Gabriel Gate dressed as a gendarme cooking a cassoulet, regardless of how they spin the “sensation” of it.

Nobody expects wall-to-wall coverage of the issue, but what is so difficult about presenting the sport in its full context? Is that asking too much of our cycling journalists? Or is a three week French travelogue still the best we can hope for?