On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 8/1/2006
“Round up the usual suspects!”
I had an August column written...all about Floyd Landis and the Tour de France. Then the story broke about his A positive test after Stage 17...an “adverse analytical finding,” as they call it.
That pretty well killed off my column, although that is the least of my concerns at this point. I am of course as upset and shocked by this turn of events as anyone. But I am not going to rush to judgment on it. We are a long way from a guilty verdict, and there are many steps still to follow in the due process of sorting this out. I am frankly disgusted with the assorted people who have already assumed that Landis is dirty; who have jumped all over this with self-righteous, sanctimonious glee. It reminds me of jackals tearing at a wounded animal.
I am afraid though that even if the subsequent tests prove Landis innocent, his accomplishments will still be tainted. He will forever be suspect in the court of public opinion. And if he is found to be guilty, then the sport will have taken a pounding from which it may never recover. Any way you slice it, this is a very dark time for the sport of bicycle racing.
I had written a small portion of my Tour de France column on the subject of the doping scandal that preceded the Tour. Given the most recent events, I might as well publish that portion of the piece. It seems more relevant now than ever. Here it is...
I have resisted the temptation to write about doping in cycling for several years, for the most part because I’m not really sure what I believe: did he or didn’t he? And if I even knew the facts of any given case, I’m not sure I know how I feel about the issue. I am terminally ambivalent.
As to the essential morality of using substances to boost performance; to get an edge: all competition is about winning, and winning means finding some way to get an advantage over the other guy or the other team. This not only includes all the supposedly natural assets we bring to the game--hard work, refined skills, mental toughness, clever planning, etc.--but it has historically embraced a wide array of sharp tactics that can tilt the odds in one’s favor. Sometimes these are admired as being good strategy and sometimes they’re decried as cheating. How one defines where one ends and the other begins is a very tough call.
We guzzle down Cytomax and Exceed and Hammer Gel on any challenging ride...to boost performance or aid recovery. We pop Ibuprofin like M&Ms to keep our knees from yapping at us and ditto for E-caps to keep our electrolytes balanced. Not to mention the jolts of caffein we pound down in sodas and espressos. Aren’t those all performance-enhancing substances? And don’t some of them have harmful side effects?
It’s all part of the game, and like all organized games, there is a set of rules that defines the terms of engagement. In cycling, as in most sports right now, lines have been drawn in the sand about performance-enhancing substances: this stuff over here is okay; that stuff over there is not. The athletes and their handlers then burn the midnight oil trying to figure out how to work right up to the edge of that line in the sand, as close as close can be, and as long as they don’t get caught with their toe over the line, then maybe they’ve succeeded in gaining an edge.
Sadly, we’ve all become so cynical that we assume everyone is doing something, and that the only reason some don’t get caught is because they have better doctors. Depending on who one believes, the testing and monitoring protocols are fraught with inconsistencies and gray areas. False positives are not uncommon, for a variety of reasons. Laboratory procedures are not fool proof. And who are these arbiters of chemical morality, these experts who define what is a natural level of any given substance in any person’s body on any given day? A number is assigned that says this level of testosterone or hematocrit is “normal,” but this level is not. We know the individual human body doesn’t conform to such a rigid template.
I honestly don’t know the truth of it, and more importantly, I don’t fully grasp the morality of it. If some riders are doing really egregious things to get an edge, then that’s wrong and should be rooted out. But if innocent riders are having their reputations and in some cases their careers destroyed so that politicians and bureaucrats can pump up their own careers, then that may be an even greater wrong.
One thing’s for sure: the current atmosphere has all the trappings of a Salem witch hunt. We have heard many a rider or his attorney declare that they are innocent until proven guilty. I think we all agree that this is how the system works, right? Wrong. In the USA and Britain, that may be how our judicial system works. But in France, it’s the other way around: once you are charged with an offense, you are presumed to be guilty, and the burden is on you to prove your innocence. In the case of an A positive test result in cycling, the burden is very much on the rider to prove that the test is wrong or anomolous in some way. He’s put in a hole and has to figure out how to dig himself out.
I don’t know which system is used in the other Euro countries involved--Spain, Germany, Italy--but much of the cycling culture takes its cue from the French model, and the Pro Tour guidelines reflect that: anyone even remotely implicated in an ongoing investigation is automatically suspended for the duration of the investigation. That seems to us to be a punishment in advance of a verdict, but that’s the way they’ve set things up. The powers that be are so mortally terrified about the taint of cheating turning off the public, and more importantly, the corporate sponors’ pipeline of money, that they will gladly throw a few riders overboard if that will mollify the suits.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net