After 17 months of litigation, Alberto Contador, the winner of the 2010 Tour de France, has been found guilty of doping. (That means that since 1995, only two Tour winners haven’t been caught up in a doping scandal.) Like any worthwhile cheater trying to cover his trail, Contador had a ridiculous excuse for his positive test: That steaks he’d eaten during the 2010 Tour had been tainted with a weight-loss and muscle-building drug called clenbuterol. Shockingly, officials didn’t buy it. Nor did they buy these equally or even more absurd excuses given by athletes in several different sports to explain why they tested positive for PEDs.

Floyd Landis: “It was the booze!”
The temporary winner of the 2006 Tour de France, Landis’s urine showed unusually high levels of testosterone after a July 27 test, something he variously attributed to: his natural manliness, a heavy night of drinking, and his thyroid medication. Just weeks after winning a remarkable victory — it was the first Tour after Lance Armstrong temporarily retired — Landis was banished to Amish country forever.

Lennox Paul: “It was the spaghetti!”
British bobsledder Lenny Paul attributed his positive test for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid found in very small quantities in the human body and commonly used to treat osteoporosis in postmenopausal women, to spaghetti sauce he’d eaten. Unfortunately, nobody told him he didn’t even need to take steroids to be good at bobsledding.

Jan Ullrich: “It was the club drugs!”
Ullrich, the German 1997 Tour winner, tested positive for amphetamines in 2002. He blamed the test on “two little pills” he’d taken at a club the night before his test, which is pretty much like saying, “I’m innocent because I thought I was taking Ecstasy!”

TAGS: doping, Floyd Landis, Lance Armstrong, Manny Ramirez, sports, steroids