"I still have the track marks," he says proudly. "This last one was a bad one. It was really painful. I think I was dehydrated or something."

Euser has nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to hide his arms behind long-sleeve shirts on a 90-degree day. These are actually badges of honor, the very visible evidence that he's got nothing illicit in his body.

The 23-year-old Californian is a professional cyclist who just happens to ride for a team with the most aggressive drug-testing program in all of sports.

Every Monday, Euser and his Team Slipstream mates head to the nearest lab. They have blood drawn and urine samples taken for an extensive round of tests that should prove to a skeptical public there's at least one cycling team that's clean.

"What we're doing," says Jason Donald, a first-year rider with the team, "is going to change the face of the sport."

This is certainly one sport that needs an image overhaul.

Cycling has been marred by numerous doping scandals, reaching its nadir last summer. Several prominent riders, including Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, were expelled from the Tour de France on the eve of the prologue for their links to a Spanish doping ring. Then, after Floyd Landis pulled off a superhuman comeback, it was revealed that the American had failed a drug test on his way to winning the world's most prestigious race.

While Landis maintains his innocence and hopes to overturn the test results on appeal, Team Slipstream decided to take matters into its own hands.

The up-and-coming American team already had signed up its first group of professional cyclists -- most of them in their early 20s -- when director Jonathan Vaughters unveiled a drug-testing program that wasn't in the contract.

In addition to the already extensive testing required by the sport's world governing body, Vaughters wanted to do even more. He had developed a regimen for another team that was abandoned before it could ever be used because a major sponsor baled on the sport after the Spanish scandal. When Team Slipstream upgraded to a full pro team this year, he carried those same ideas to his own group of cyclists.

"It became very apparent that now is the time," Vaughters said in an interview at the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel, where the team hunkered down one night during the weeklong Tour de Georgia.

Since everyone already had signed a deal for the upcoming season, it was an entirely voluntary move. No one had to take part if he didn't want to.

No one objected.

"I'm sure they don't like the hassle. It's a pain in the rear end," said Vaughters, a former pro cyclist himself. "But you've got to remember: For the most part, these are young guys who grew up when all these cataclysmic problems were blowing up the sport. They realize, 'Hey, this is good for us to set an example for the rest of the cycling world.' "

Donald, a 27-year-old Colorado native, grew up fretting about what would be required to reach the top levels of cycling.

"It made me pretty angry," he conceded. "I was wondering when I was going to be faced with the decision to either end my career and stay clean, or keep my career going and not stay clean. Watching what's happened the past few months with numerous riders, I just figured when I got to that point and somebody asked me to do it, I would quit the sport and tell everybody how bad it really is."

Donald expects other teams to follow Slipstream's example and looks forward in four or five years to lining up for a big race, looking around at his competitors and having no doubts about whether he's at a chemical disadvantage.

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