It isn’t clear how long it will take cycling to escape the long shadow cast by Lance Armstrong‘s six doping-tainted Tour de France victories.

It hasn’t happened yet, as Chris Froome found out while winning the 2015 Tour yesterday.

He was a little too convincing as the winner of a tough mountain stage on Bastille Day, July 14, when he seized control of the race, and that was all it took for the questions to begin, with the clear subtext that Froome must be cheating, too.

Over the final 12 days of the race, Froome was spat at by fans, and one of them apparently tossed a bag of urine on the Englishman.

Clearly, riders should not be assaulted by fans, but it is hard to condemn those who limit their suspicions to tough questions about a rider’s superiority. If we have learned anything about cycling over the past 20 years, we know that “suspicion” is a good default setting when evaluating any great performance in the demanding sport.

Armstrong didn’t invent doping in cycling, but he perfected it, and his admission that he systematically doped was a blow from which the sport has yet to recover.

So when Froome finished 59 seconds ahead of the field on Stage 10, things got ugly in a hurry.

The next day, Froome offered to undergo more testing at the end of the race. “Obviously, right here at the moment, my focus is on the race, but certainly I’m open minded to potentially doing some physiological testing at some point after the Tour,” he said.

That wasn’t enough to quell suspicions and a week later he suggested he was being unfairly singled out by paranoid fans and media.

Maybe it was unfair, given that he has never failed a test, but that is the kind of scrutiny the Tour leader can expect, these days.

And remember, Armstrong never failed a test, either, during his six Tour victories. Listening to Froome insist on his innocence … well, it was impossible not to flash back and remember Armstrong doing the very same thing.

Cycling is tainted. Some of its leading practitioners have failed doping tests, including Alberto Contador, 2007 winner of the Tour de France. The 2014 champion, Vicenzo Nibali, rides for the Astana team, whose members failed five drug tests in a year — though he was not one of those found to be doping.

Just as Lance Armstrong didn’t invent doping, neither did it end with his downfall.

Riders who blow away the Tour de France field on a mountain stage, well, they are going to be looked at askance for a very long time.

That is cycling’s self-inflicted curse.