Just before the Tour de France, Sports Illustrated ran a feature on Floyd Landis that focused on his origins as a Mennonite–raised boy whose love and talent for mountain biking literally pushed him into the very different world of international cycling.

While the Mennonites are not quite as strict as the Amish (for instance, Landis attended public high school), there’s a charming story about Landis insisting on wearing sweat pants for his first mountain bike race because bicycle shorts were immodest by Mennonite standards.

Jumping ahead a decade and a half later, we have Floyd Landis telling the world that after performing poorly in a critical mountain stage he decided to drown his sorrows in hard liquor and that may have contributed to his unusually high ratio of testosterone to epi-testosterone. Landis’s story comes bizarrely close to the early Farrelly Brothers farce, Kingpin, which traced the rise and corruption of Randy Quaid, a young Amish man, with a passion for bowling.

With Justin Gatlin and Barry Bonds also prominent in the news lately, I have been wondering if a couple generations down the line if our genetically-enhanced, chemically optimized, and possibly bio-cyber equipped descendants will think of us as “Amish”. One sign in my household is that my daughter has a close friend whose parents refuse to have a television or an Internet connection at home, she calls her friend’s family “Amish”, though they’re not religious at all.

Competitive athletics does seem to be one of the last realms where we persist in this sharp moral division between “natural” and “unfairly enhanced”. No one, for instance, complains that Courtney Cox shouldn’t get roles because she went through a late puberty after she did her time as Alex Keaton’s girlfriend on Family Ties. If I remember correctly (yes it’s embarrassing that I know these things) Jenny McCarthy couldn’t get into Playboy pre-plastic surgery despite the fact that she was otherwise quite attractive. To be fair, any number of folks do bemoan the departure of the “natural” body from our popular notions of sexual attractiveness and I'm definitely not sure how the public will react to Mel Gibson or Lindsay Lohan's apparent choices of "enhancement".

I also get a constant flow of spam offering some equivalent form of male enhancement, I still think that my wife got mad at me at some point and turned my name over to a mailing list. I have yet to hear a story of a young woman dumping her boyfriend because he has the same doctor as Rush Limbaugh.

Obviously, we don’t insist that people who wear contact lenses are cheating in life. Most Americans also have very few concerns about artificial hearts or ironically enough the possibility that Floyd Landis might try to compete in cycling with an artificial hip some time in the future.