Tour de France 2012: Bradley Wiggins must not let route to Paris become a road to bitterness Floyd Landis, you will remember, kicked up a terrible stink against the authorities until evidence of his guilt pushed him into whistleblowing: some of it aimed at Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour winner whose rambling legal deposition to a Texas judge this week drew the following rebuke for his legal team: "This court is not inclined to indulge Armstrong's desire for publicity, self-aggrandisement or vilification of defendants, by sifting through 80 mostly unnecessary pages in search of the few kernels of factual material relevant to his claims." The world of professional sport now offends as much with its denials as the pharmaceutical cheating. After rigging the outcome they bully us with their speeches and legal threats. Armstrong, who denies all charges of wrongdoing, has taken a supremely aggressive line against journalists and others who question his achievements; an approach that became more problematic when the US Anti-Doping Agency accused him of taking part in a vast doping conspiracy during his Tour winning years (1999-2005) - and three former staff members and consultants on his former teams were handed lifetime sports bans by USADA. All of which brings us to the problem of the headline act whose glorious exploits unfold under a cloud of suspicion placed there by anonymous others. It brings us to Bradley Wiggins, who fought his way uphill from Albertville to La Toussuire yesterday to finish sixth on Stage 11 of a Tour that could end with an emaciated London Mod as king of the French roads. Wiggins has always fulminated against suspicion. After finishing fourth in the 2009 Tour he walked out of a Paris bar when an Australian colleague swayed over and said: "Congratulations, Brad. I know all the other riders are saying you're on drugs but I think you're clean. History records "Wiggo's" disgust when a Cofidis team-mate tested positive and it chronicles his outbursts against invisible character assassinations on social media. Let me be clear. The point of mentioning Myerscough, Chambers and Landis in this context is to suggest that indignation is futile. He cannot stop the tide of innuendo because its authors feel emboldened and not discouraged by denials. "To me, it's them p------ all over everything I've done," he said this week while being accused of behaving "like a footballer" by Vincenzo Nibali, who objected to his British rival's aggressive stare and a rude "hand gesture." Team Sky's thrilling challenge for this year's race is lighting up our monsoon season. It picks up where Andy Murray left off in his Wimbledon final against Roger Federer and is the perfect prelude to the Olympics. With its twinkling light, hilltop vistas and delirious audiences it is a haven from the damp-dog greyness of our own anti-summer. It may be that Wiggins is using the insinuations as fuel to force him up those alpine roads, which are unrecognizable from his old velodrome hunting ground, in which case flailing at his enemies serves a purpose. But the more intemperate his responses to accusations become the more you see the pointlessness of anger. If he is clean he might as well not bother. The doubt around him is fog-like and irremovable. It can't be smashed away by declarations of innocence. And we know who to blame for that: the dopers and con artists who have industrialised pharmaceutical fraud. Wiggins attacks them too. But it would be a pity if this race became a road of bitterness for him. On a Tour of no surrendering, that would be a sad concession to his enemies.