Chris Froome could be banned from 2018 Tour de France for taking too much asthma medication. Seriously.

Cycling! Doping! The Tour de France! We get to mush all those words together once again because four-time Tour winner Chris Froome, cycling’s best rider since Lance Armstrong, failed a doping test during the Vuelta a España last September. Team Sky reported Wednesday that Froome tested positive for double the levels of the asthma medication salbutamol permitted by the World Anti-Doping Agency. He has not yet been suspended, but this incident throws his bid for a record-tying fifth Tour victory in serious jeopardy.

Froome’s failed test comes at the tail end of a rocky year for Sky. The team has systematically dominated cycling’s crown jewel, the Tour de France, for the better part of this decade, but has also come under scrutiny for the way it has dominated. A highly publicized UK Anti-Doping investigation into Sky and British Cycling closed last month without charges, but cycling’s reputation as a dirty sport makes even exonerated allegations difficult to shake.

In other words, this is a very big deal for the sport, even if the allegation itself seems rather tame compared to getting busted for, like, cocaine and blood transfusions. Do you have questions? Because I do. Let’s wade through this together.

Apparently. Froome has used inhalers in the peloton before, and exercise-induced asthma is a very real thing. And WADA accounts for that, allowing a threshold of 1,000 ng/ml that, for all we know, Froome has never exceeded before. Doubling that threshold in the final three days of one cycling’s three biggest races is not a good look, especially for a rider and team as manicured and meticulous as Froome and Sky.

There is precedent for this, and it isn’t good for Froome. Sprinter Alessandro Petacchi was suspended from cycling for a year after testing positive for too much salbutamol in his system during the 2007 Giro d’Italia. More recently, Diego Ulissi was given a nine-month ban for a positive test — 1900 ng/ml — for salbutamol during the 2015.

Ulissi is the best-case scenario for Froome. If a nine-month suspension were applied retroactively from when his positive test occurred, he would just be eligible for the Tour. Froome failed the test on Sept. 7, and the 2018 Tour will begin on July 7, 10 months later.

Of course, that would look like a very convenient judgment by cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, and it will surely consider the optics of any decision. At the very least, a suspension would strip Froome of his 2017 Vuelta a España title, which is a very big deal on its own.

Maybe, maybe not.

This is bad for anyone who likes the sport of cycling and wishes that mainstream coverage of it wasn’t so heavily focused on cheating and the fog that descended upon it after the world found out Lance had been manipulating its heart for a decade.

Then again, this is good for anyone who isn’t naive enough to think that doping isn’t still a rampant problem in cycling, and is hopeful that a high-profile ban might put a Band-Aid on the whole thing.

You can feel meh about this, too. At least, taking too many inhaler puffs doesn’t sound as bad as other, more devious schemes. There is still a chance that human error is involved here. This is about to be a long ride, and it’s worth paying attention and not rushing to judgment.

I’m hoping for the best, personally. I’d rather not see the biggest name in cycling get taken down, if in fact there is a way to fully exonerate him. There probably isn’t — as in, even if Froome somehow doesn’t get punished for this, there will be a justifiable cloud around him when he’s mountain goat-ing his way through the Alps this July.

Which is too bad, because all I really want to do is make inhaler jokes.

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Nerd.