Has doping caused cycling to lose its credibility?
Text: Steve Smith and Angus Powers. Illustrations: Chris Valentine. Article from the September 2012 issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine.
Has doping caused cycling to lose its credebility?
Suspension of disbelief. It was a term first coined by English philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. He was referring to a fictional tale in which one is required to buy into an implausible premise for the story to work. As readers or viewers, we do it all the time.
Take Superman.
The Man Of Steel’s creators have asked us to believe that all Soop has to do is don a pair of dark, plastic-framed glasses, and no-one will notice any similarity between the tall, well-built guy in royal-blue spandex and red cape, and the tall, well-built guy in the hipster glasses who often writes newspaper stories about the tall, well-built guy in blue spandex and red cape.
It’s a ridiculous proposition that, outside of fiction, is laughable. Which is much like those other purveyors of spandex… professional cyclists. Why? Because, as a sports fan, these guys are asking the same of you. Their suspension of disbelief gambit is that cycling remains true to a central tenet of sport: that is, it’s fundamentally about human ability. And that the person who wins is the one who is the most skilful, or has trained the hardest, or preferably both. It’s why all sports governing bodies have very strict rules governing any equipment used and, significantly, forbid any drugs that may enhance performance. The playing field must be as level as possible. It’s all about the athlete. It’s about the triumph of human endeavour.
From the outset, professional cycling has raised its middle finger to that one. Tales of early heroes being spiked to the gills on anything from strychnine, cocaine, aspirin, chloroform, and amphetamines to caffeine and alcohol are part of cycling folklore. The winner of the 1923 Tour de France, Henri Pelissier, even boasted to journalists, saying he and his brother Francis had “cocaine to go in our eyes, chloroform for our gums, and do you want to see the pills? We keep going on dynamite. In the evenings we dance around our rooms instead of sleeping.” Rather than being condemned for his statement, the brothers were glorified. And that’s the problem. According to both riders and fans, doping has always been part of the sport, it always will be, and that’s OK… let’s call it Suspension Of Disbelief Premise No 1.
Just in case you don’t entirely buy that, pro cycling has a back-up plan: Suspension Of Disbelief Premise No 2, and it goes something like this: “OK, doping was a problem, but these days we’ve almost entirely, we’re pretty sure, stamped it out”.
Right. Let’s take a gander at the stats, shall we. Since drug testing started in the mid-60s there has been a long list of riders who have tested positive for some or other performance enhancing substance. We are talking literally hundreds of riders… from legends and Tour winners like Eddie Merckx (Et tu, Eddie? – Ed.) and Pedro Delgado, to the many little-known domestiques in the peloton.
“But that was then… things have changed” is often floated as a defence. Really? Take a look at the last 16 years of the Tour de France. Thirteen of those years have been won by riders who have been convicted of, admitted to, been heavily implicated in, or even suspiciously died of, doping. That’s Bjarne Riis, Jan Ulrich, Marco Pantani RIP, Floyd Landis, Alberto Contador… and, yes, Lance Armstrong.
And that, I think is the saddest part. It’s beginning to look as though one of the world’s most revered athletes – a man who managed to overcome great odds to win seven Tour De France titles – may well have been on the juice. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire… and the Armstrong/doping saga has been producing plenty of smoke over the years. Sadly, now, with the US Anti-Doping Agency’s strong case, we’re beginning to see the flames too.
To believe there’s even an iota of credibility in professional cycling means you are either naive… or are peddling along in the Suspension Of Disbelief peleton.
Watch cycling or go to the movies. It’s the same thing.
No-one in his right mind would deny how much repeated doping scandals have damaged cycling’s reputation. But let’s survey the playing field before we judge too hastily, or too harshly. British cycling, in the form of Sky Procyling and Team Great Britain, is currently the most dominant force in the sport, having extended their command of the track to the road. They now boast the reigning world road race champion, a 1-2 finish in the 2012 Tour de France, the Olympic time trial champion, as well as 70% of the track gold medals that were on offer at the London Games.
Their staggering success was achieved not by ordering in industrial quantities of EPO, but rather through a policy of “marginal gains” that sought to find fractional improvements in myriad aspects of a team performance. For teams like Sky and Garmin-Sharp (whose young Canadian star Ryder Hesjedal won the 2012 Giro d’ltalia) to have shown that you can race and win clean in the 21st century is a massive mindset shift that spells the end for cycling’s most outdated traditions and assumptions.
“I think the Tour is a lot more human now,” said Bradley Wiggins, meaning that as the Tour has got cleaner, it has got slower – literally – as the riders’ sustained power-to-weight ratios up the biggest climbs have dropped to a far more plausible 6W/kg, way less than the enhanced 6.4-6.5W/kg readings that were common until four or five years ago. (Cyclists measure energy expenditure in Watts per kilogram. A good amateur can go at approximately 3W/kg for an hour on flat roads. Olympic track sprinters can reach 2SW/kg. – Ed .)
But when it comes to how a particular sport is perceived, bear in mind that doping in cycling is not the only story in doping. One of France’s Olympic steeplechasers tested positive in July, but the news was processed without any of the police drama and screaming headlines that accompanied Frank Schleck’s fail. As noted by the World Anti-Doping Agency, dealing steroids is now more lucrative than the global heroin trade, which gives some insight into the scale of the problem worldwide. And an under-reported footnote of Operation Puerto (the doping bust that brought down Jan Ullrich) had Dr Fuentes, the mastermind of the ring, expressing surprise that no-one was interested that his client list extended beyond cyclists to include footballers and tennis players too.
WADA estimate that 10% of elite athletes are doping, substantially more than the 1-2% who are caught. Victor Conte, who doped Marion Jones, pegs it at closer to 60% (down from 80% when he was running the BALCO racket). These are worrying figures, given that the IOC conducted 6 250 tests for 240 banned substances at this year’s Games. They bust more than a hundred athletes in the lead-up to London, but it’s only the “dopey dopers” who are dumb enough to get caught in competition.
However, there’s only so much that WADA can do without governing bodies showing the same kind of unflinching commitment that the US Anti-Doping Agency have displayed in the Lance Armstrong case. The problem is, when the fox is guarding the henhouse, how much of an incentive is there for administrators to dig for dirt on their sport’s biggest stars?
Whatever else you say about cycling, it pioneered the use of the biological passport (which is the cutting edge of the war on dope), and it remains the most drug-tested sport out there.
Sometimes it’s just a numbers game. The more you look, the more you find, as Sports Illustrated learned when we investigated schoolboy rugby. (Read our special report here: www.sportsillustrated.co.za/rugby/doping). Of the players I surveyed, 17% admitted using performance-enhancing drugs themselves, and 57% knew other players who were. When first-team captains from South Africa’s biggest schools talk about a steroid scourge sweeping through the game, you’d expect SARU (or the schools) to pay attention.
But searching the soul of your sport and coming clean is not for the faint-hearted. Many would rather hear no evil and see no evil. Which leaves the question of credibility not for cycling alone out of all professional sports to answer.
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