On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 8/1/2007
“It never seems to end.”
It's Monday, the day after the final Sunday
of the 2007 Tour de France. In an ideal, pollyanna world, I would
be thrilled and satiated with the exciting
conclusion of this, the biggest bike race of the year. But like the rest of you,
I suspect, I find myself in a muddled state of mixed emotions about the events
of the last three weeks at the grandest of the grand tours.
For sure, I am happy to see our homeboy, Levi Leipheimer, up there on the podium.
And I'm especially happy to see how he got there, with that sizzling time
trial on Stage 19 and his gritty, hang-in-there performance on the Col d'Aubisque
on Stage 16. I might have wished that he had done a bit better than third, but
why be greedy? The two boys on the next two steps up--Alberto Contador in first
and Cadel Evans in second--both appear to be not only very deserving of their
placings but also genuine stand-up guys. Real gentlemen in the old-school tradition.
At least that's how it appears. But appearances can be deceiving. This time
last year, I was writing a story about the heart-warming saga of Floyd Landis
resurrecting himself, like Lazarus, to win le Tour. Then the rumors of a positive
test started to circulate...
But let's leave that aspect of the whole affair for a little later. First,
allow me to dwell for a moment in the happy little fiction that the podium is
entirely clean and virtuous.
The fact that barely more than half a minute covers the three of them after three
weeks of epic stages is another cause for excitement and enjoyment. That's
the closest spread covering the top three in the history of the Tour and I think
in the history of all grand tours. This is entertainment, after all, and what
could be more entertaining than a neck-and-neck fight to the finish?
Just for the smug little pleasure of patting myself on the back, I will copy
here a prediction I made on our club chat list at the end of the last mountain
stage on Wednesday (looking forward to the upcoming time trial): "...Contador
looked tired today, and Evans certainly worked his ass off to limit his losses.
Of the three, Levi looked the freshest. He had a subpar TT last time, and Contador
did way better than anyone expected him to do. So if Evans does about the same
as he did before--as he is capable of doing--and if Contador doesn't do
as well as he did--as might be possible: he's only 24 and has never been
this deep into a grand tour before, and could be getting tired--and if Levi cranks
off a really hot TT--which sometimes it appears he can do--and goes even a little
faster than Evans and a lot faster than Contador...why then, we might end up
with an almost three-way dead heat for first place! Only seconds between the
three of them, like Fignon and Lemond."
Most of that prediction turned out to be accurate. Evans did about what he would
have been expected to do and Levi threw down an absolute scorcher of a ride (the
fourth fastest time trial in grand tour history). The only one who did not quite
cooperate was Contador, who did do less well than his two competitors, as predicted,
but did just enough to stay in yellow by 23 seconds. In the "what-if?" department,
one can look at the eight seconds between Leipheimer and Evans and think back
to the ten-second penalty assessed against Levi for a too-obvious assist from
the team car on Stage 8. Without that penalty, Levi would have been second...by
two seconds.
That would also have left him 21 seconds behind his teammate Contador, which--coincidentally--is
exactly how many seconds he gave up to Contador in the first time trial. I'm
not sure that little numerical tidbit proves anything, except the old truism
that every second counts.
So anyway...the outcome of the tour appears to be a happy ending--appears to
be, so far--but getting from the beginning to the end has been about like childbirth,
and in fact maybe a breech birth or something even more excruciatingly painful
than the normal level of suffering that comes with riding 20 200-K stages at
race pace. No one needs to be reminded about what has caused all that extra excruciating
pain. It's the 900-pound gorilla in the middle of the room: performance-enhancing
drugs; their use and the battle to clean them out of the sport.
The title on this essay is a quote from Alejandro Valverde, commenting on the
third or fourth or fifth failed drug test of the tour...the never-ending drumbeat
of shocking revelations and broken promises; of lies and excuses, accusations
and denials. It never does seem to end. Even as I write this on the day after
the tour, another major player has been busted: Iban Mayo has tested positive
for EPO. More disturbing are stories out of Germany citing a "drug expert" who
claims that the tour winner, Alberto Contador, is deeply implicated in the Operacion
Puerto scandal. Contador of course denies it, and so far both the Spanish
authorities and the UCI back Contador on this one. But I wonder if I can type
fast enough and get this piece posted to its website quick enough to beat the
next breaking story that topples Contador or some other supposedly clean rider.
It's a sorry state we're in, where the accomplishments of all these
hard-working warriors are completely overshadowed and trivialized by the story
that won't go away...the headline grabbing garbage that always sells way
better than plain old athletics. But that's what we've come to, and
that's why the bulk of this column is about the bad stuff.
The most recent chapter in this tawdry soap opera goes back over a year, to the
revelations of Operacion Puerto, the Spanish investigation of a major
blood-doping lab that ensnared something like 100 riders, including Jan Ullrich,
Ivan Basso, Francisco Mancebo, Jörg Jaksche, Alexandre Vinokourov, on and
on. It had an impact on last year's tour, with so many riders excluded from
the event because of the pending investigations. And the ripples have continued
all year. Ullrich has retired in disgrace. Basso confessed and is serving his
two-year suspension. Jaksche, at first all denials--and apparently exonerated--then
found himself cornered by the evidence and decided to tell all--to the media,
for a price--and in the process slung around several cubic yards of gossip and
innuendo damaging to many a rider. One by one, other riders 'fessed up to
their past sins. Erik Zabel tearfully came clean. Even Bjarne Riis--head of the
CSC team and a hardball anti-drug crusader--admitted he had been dirty when he
won the Tour de France back in 1996. (The Tour de France bigwigs immediately
demanded the return of his yellow jersey, prompting this tart rejoinder from
Lance Armstrong: "I don't see them asking Richard Virenque to return
any of his polka-dot jerseys!") And of course, overshadowing it all has
been the long, painfully protracted case of Floyd Landis and his testosterone
positive from perhaps the greatest single stage in Tour history. The greatest
stage or the greatest scam, depending on your point of view. (More about Floyd
later.)
It got to the point where it was impossible to mention bike racing in the mainstream
press without throwing in some cliché about "rocked by scandal" or "a
sport in turmoil." Or worse. Usually worse. As the 2007 Tour approached,
those of us who care about the sport were hunkered down, hoping for the best
but fearing the worst. In a way, we got both...a dickens of a Tour. The best
of times and the worst of times.
The Tour started out great with huge crowds for the stages in England and the
low countries. Fabian Cancellara nabbed the maillot jaune in the prologue
and defended it all the way to the mountains, including an astonishing win on
Stage 3 where he simply flew off the front of the charging sprinters' brigade
to steal the win. (If you can just for a second understand how fast those guys
are going when they're winding it up for a sprint, and then to think of
someone riding off the front of that juggernaut... It was awesome.)
Things were going well until the first rumble of trouble when it was reported
on July 18 that T-Mobile's Patrik Sinkewitz had tested positive for synthetic
testosterone in an out-of-competition control back in June. This wouldn't
have caused much of a fuss overall, except for two things. Thing one is that
T-Mobile has made a great, self-righteous noise about being in the forefront
of the fight against drugs, implementing the most stringent testing guidelines
of any team. They have trumpeted their squeaky-clean credibility. Oops! Since
the Zabel story broke in Germany--along with several other related nuggets about
other German riders, not least Ullrich--feelings have been running very high
in that country on this topic. The moment the Sinkewitz hit the fan, the German
national television network pulled the plug on the Tour coverage. That's
thing two in this little tempest in a teevee-pot.
But that was just the opening salvo. A much bigger, Tour-rocking shocker came
on July 25 when it was announced that Alexandre Vinokourov had tested positive
for an homologous blood transfusion after his storming win in the first time
trial. This was huge. Vino was the odds-on favorite to win the Tour--on paper
at least, before the Tour began--based primarily on his having won the time trial
at the Dauphiné back in June. I never bought that prediction. I noted
that he lost buckets of time on the big ascent of Ventoux the next day. He more
or less claimed that was intentional, but I had to wonder. His palmarés are
somewhat patchwork. Yes, he won the Vuelta last year, but in many another event--including
his last TdF in 2005--he has cracked under intense pressure. He reminds me a
little of el Diablo, Claudio Chiappucci: utterly unpredictable and capable
of outrageous, peloton-shattering attacks, but always susceptable to having a
catastrophic jour sans, where he blows up and loses minutes in big bunches.
Sure enough, he got himself behind the 8-ball in this year's Tour. Bad luck
had a lot to do with that. He crashed badly on Stage 5 at a crucially inopportune
moment when the leaders were not inclined to wait for him. He lost time on that
stage, and with what were reported to be up to 40 stitches across both his kneecaps,
he lost more time in the Alps, in particular on the stage he had won so magnificently
in 2005, over the Galibier and down to Briançon. At that point, he was
toast for the overall. But wait! He came back to win that first time trial, after
everyone had counted him out. Won it brilliantly and moved back into the top
ten. Wow! What a guy! What panache! What grinta! But then, the very next
day, he blew up again and lost a huge amount of time in the first day in the
Pyrennees. At that point he was 34 minutes back, and no amount of miracles could
put him back in the hunt. But he wasn't done. As a non-factor, he was allowed
the liberty to get into a break on another mountain stage, and he won again.
Amazing. From dead back to alive back to dead back to alive. The human yo-yo.
But then the press release: just at the moment of his latest victory, the announcement
of the positive from the time trial test. Vino was tossed from the tour, along
with his whole Astana team, including top contenders Andreas Klöden and
Andrei Kashechkin who were in 5th and 7th at the time.
Although the shockwaves from the positive were felt throughout the Tour and the
world of cycling, one didn't get the impression that too many people were
really surprised to find Vino in this predicament. Here's a guy born and
raised in the eastern bloc, where the traditions of creative pharmacology run
deep, and he's the leader of a team that owes its very existence to the
infamous Operacion Puerto. The Astana team was formerly the Liberty Segueros
team of Manolo Saiz, the key figure at the heart of the whole blood doping quagmire.
When he went down in a soup of blood bags, the Khazakh government bailed out
their favorite son by reinventing the team around him. Right from the start,
a suspicious whiff of brimstone has swirled around the team. One of my friends
remarked after their early successes in this race and in the Giro as well: "They
must have a really good doctor!"
Even so, it seemed a little harsh that the whole team--Klöden, Kashechkin,
Savoldelli, et al--should have to fall on their swords just because the boss
got busted. It seemed that ASO, the organizers of the Tour, wanted to wipe away
any taint of the tortured team. But remember: Astana was a wild card entry to
the Tour...there by special invitation of those same promoters. I'd have
thought just tossing Vino would have been enough. But these are desperate times,
and folks tend to get a little overwrought when the heat is on.
At this point, everybody was a little overwrought. Hyperbole and hysteria ruled
the day. Everybody had an opinion and very few voices could be heard talking
any sort of sense or moderation. But wait: there's more...
The very next day, a coalition of primarily French teams decided to have a protest
at the start of the stage. A little back story on this one: for years, French
riders and the French media have been claiming that the reason no Frenchmen has
won the Tour since Bernard Hinault back in 1985--22 years!--is because the French
are held to a higher standard of drug testing protocol. They're not doped
up to the eyeballs and hence can't compete against all the other riders
(implying therefore that everyone who has won a tour since they last did has
been juiced). I honestly don't know if their standards are more stringent.
If they say so, there must be some basis for the claim, or someone would challenge
them on it. But to me, it comes off sounding kind of whiny.
In any event, the French teams decided to express their deep outrage by sitting
down on the starting line of the stage. They eventually did ride. And lo and
behold, at the finish line, it was a member of one of those holier-than-thou
French teams who was the next one to be busted for a failed test...Cristian Moreni
of the Cofidis squad. Moreni was led away from the finish area by gendarmes and
the Cofidis team withdrew from the tour in shame. Okay, so he isn't really
a Frenchie...just a Lombard riding on a French team. Still, the irony was as
thick as paté.
But again, that was just a little intermezzo in the bigger opera. Later
that same day, the biggest bombshell of all fell dead center in the middle of
the race and blew it all to hell. This one takes a little telling. It is beyond
bizarre. Back on Stage 8 on July 15, Michael Rasmussen had attacked out of a
breakaway to win the first mountaintop finish of the Tour and grab the lead.
Rasmussen, known as the Chicken (because it's his favorite food, not because
he looks like one) had been allowed in the break, frankly, because no one considered
him a real threat for the overall. Twice in recent years he has won the maillot
pois of best climber, but past performance indicated he couldn't time
trial his way out of a paper bag, and if you can't hold your own in the time
trials, no amount of climbing prowess will see you through to Paris. His final
TT from the 2005 TdF was the stuff of legends...the wrong kind of legends: two
crashes, three bike changes, and a tumble from a possible podium step all the
way down to 7th; one of the most pathetic and pitiful excuses for a time trial
ever. Nothing he has done since has given any indication that he has mended his
ways, and he even admitted that he hasn't been working on his time trialing.
(This may have been a masterful bit of sandbagging.) The book on the Chicken
was that he would be fried and out of yellow after the first time trial.
It didn't work out that way. He rode a brilliant chrono and saved his jersey.
Then, over the course of the next few days, he defended it against all comers--he
and his inspired Rabobank team, led by the wonderful, popular Michael Boorgerd
in his final Tour. Several strong riders made runs at him, most notably Contador,
but he took every punch they threw and then, in his moment of greatest glory,
on the final mountain stage to Col d'Aubisque, he punched back and broke
Contador and everyone else. He won and grabbed enough seconds to put together
an unassailable lead, regardless of what he might do in the final time trial.
Game over. The Tour was his...his greatest ambition had been achieved.
Someone wrote to our club chat list and said: "Is that it then? Is Rasmussen
gonna win it all?" And I wrote back: "Unless he's the next one
to fail a drug test." In fact, he did not fail a drug test. It is much,
much more complex and strange than that. All during his tenure in yellow, there
had been rumors dogging him about missed drug tests back in June and earlier.
Understand how this works: pro cyclists are required to be available for out-of-competition
tests anywhere, anytime. They are required to notify their governing bodies--team
and/or national federation--of their whereabouts at all times. The Danish drug
czars claimed he had missed two tests and so they booted him off the national
team. This was announced midway through the Tour, even though they knew all this
weeks before the Tour began. Had the Danish authorities communicated their concerns
to the Tour organizers ahead of time, he probably would not have been allowed
to start the Tour.
Naturally, Rasmussen has his side of the story to tell as well. He lives in Monaco
for tax purposes and claims to no longer be answerable to the Danish authorities,
and he hasn't been on the Danish national team since 2004, so they can hardly
kick him off a team he's not on to begin with. And anyway, it was all just
a clerical error...a misunderstanding. But the real sticking point was that he
lied to his Rabobank team about his whereabouts. His wife is Mexican, and he
often travels to Mexico for the high-altitude training. He claimed that's
where he was during the time in question, but Davide Cassani, a former Italian
pro and currently the commentator for RAI, the Italian Tour TV feed, claimed
he saw the Chicken training in the Dolomites when he said he was in Mexico. We
don't know what he was doing in Italy besides training, but the presumption
is that he was there for clandestine meetings with one of those magic doctors
who can make you a better man than nature can...a "preparatore."
This travel sleight of hand might not seem like all that big a deal to you or
me, but in the Big Brother world of pro cycling drug tests, it is a major no-no.
When confronted with the truth by his team manager, Theo DeRooy, Rasmussen admitted
the subtrefuge. DeRooy could have called a press conference for the next day
and cleared the air on the matter. By itself, it didn't seem like an offense
that was all that big a deal. After all, the Danes were claiming he had missed
two drug test appointments, and the UCI protocol allows three misses before they
bring the hammer down on you. But DeRooy did not do that. He would not countenance
the lie and he pulled Rasmussen from the Tour on the spot, sure-thing yellow
jersey and all. Later that night, Rasmussen was flown out of the country in a
private jet...to Italy. DeRooy's actions were either the work of an extremely
honest and courageous man or a sign of blithering panic and fear. How you feel
about Rasmussen's probable innocence or culpability will inform your spin
on that one.
As Phil Liggett would say, "Well, that's put the cat among the pigeons!" Just
when it seemed things could not possibly get any worse or any more astounding,
they did.
Meanwhile, Vinokourov's B-sample had come back positive too, so he was definitely persona
non grata. He has been fired from the Astana team. Bye...don't let the
door hit you in the ass on the way out! While many people seem quite willing
to lump Rasmussen right in there with the other malefactors, it's worth
remembering that he has not failed any drug tests. He has not even failed to
abide by the UCI regulations on testing...not quite. He may have been more than
a little cavalier about bending the rules, but he hasn't actually broken
any...except for being dishonest with his own team. That in itself may be the
worst offense of all--a failure of trust--but it isn't something that can
get him barred from the sport. It's possible he could be back at the Tour
next year, as mad as a wet chicken.
Now, with Mayo nailed today and rumors circulating about the formerly pristine
Contador, Valverde's lament rings true: it never seems to end. As much as
we enjoyed the good parts of the Tour--and of the Giro and all our other favorite
races--we are not sure right now if the enjoyment is worth the suffering we have
to endure alongside it...that failure of trust; that feeling of being jerked
around like a marionette in the hands of a palsied puppeteer. Once burned, twice
shy is the old saying, but we're way past being burned once. I can't
begin to count the times we have invested our enthusiasm in some titanic tussle
on the slopes of the Alps or the Pyrenees; where we have cheered for our favorites
or honored the triumphs of the best man on the mountain, only to find the next
day that the best man was jacked up to the tits on some chemical cocktail with
too many letters in its name. We become leery of committing our hopes or our
emotional capital to these clowns when for all we know, tomorrow they'll
go from hero to zero.
It was 40 years ago this July that Tom Simpson collapsed and died on Ventoux,
infamously cranked on speed. He wasn't the first to add a little rocket
fuel to his daily diet, and in the 40 years since, he has been joined by a host
of others looking for that silver bullet that could get them a little edge. In
fact, looking back now, there have probably been times in the pro peloton when
those not prepped up on something illicit were about as rare as vegens at a Texas
barbecue.
But cycling has no corner on the performance-boosters. There is probably not
a sport out there that hasn't been visited by this insidious disease. Track
and Field has the plague at least as bad as cycling. Look at any line-up for
a world-class100-meter dash, and you can see the 'roids rippling under those
skin suits. Remember when the Chinese swimmers burst on the world scene and started
copping one world record after another, and the coach claimed the secret was
a mysterious extract of silk worms? Yeah, right! Football--both kinds, American
and world--are rife with drugs. How else do you explain lineman who weigh 350
pounds and can run a 4.4 40? Baseball...a few names: Canseco, McGwire, Palmeiro,
Sosa, Bonds. Here we are, as I write, one swat away from Barry Bonds breaking
the all-time home run record. Lots of angst in the sports world about whether
he deserves the record or whether anyone even cares anymore. Clearly, he has
been a tremendous talent over the course of many years. But just as clearly,
he has been pumped up on magic potions for some of those years, including most
of the most recent ones. If baseball were as proactive about punishing drug users
as cycling is, Bonds would have failed a test, or several tests, years ago, and
he would have served a two-year suspension, same as Basso and Hamilton and Millar,
and the question of breaking Aaron's record would be a non-issue. He'd
never have gotten close.
That's one of the things that really fries my bacon about this recent furor
over drugs in cycling. No other sport has such a comprehensive program in place
for testing and catching cheats. No other sport is so committed to facing its
demons. Yes, we realize that cycling--as a sport--has had a long-term addiction
to drugs. We are now in the process of going through withdrawal, and that is
never a pretty sight. But at least we're dealing with it. Lots of other
sports organizations are still half-hearted at best in their commitment to the
battle. There is still a lot of looking the other way going on out there.
And yet it's precisely because cycling is hammering on this so hard that
it is perceived to be so corrupt. You can't fix this sort of thing under
cover, in the dark. It has to have a bright light focused on it, and unfortunately,
many ignorant people, who know nothing about cycling, see only the sensational
headlines about the drug busts and fail to see that this purging is heading toward
a cleaner, more credible sport.
Now, having hopped around on that soap box for a few paragraphs, let me add this
disclaimer. This is a war, and in all wars there is collateral damage. Some think
that's acceptable. I do not. What I'm talking about here is the process
of the drug tests and the processing of the samples. It is true that the testing
equipment and the people doing the tests are both getting better. But neither
appears to be error-free yet, and aberrant test results can and do happen, particularly
with certain tests. I'm no chemist. I only know what I read in the cycling
press, and I can't always swear that I understand all of that, once it gets
seriously technical. But if at least some of what I have read is true, then some
serious mistakes have been made and some cyclists--and athletes in other sports
as well--have been unfairly stigmatized by flawed tests and moreover by an hysterical
rush to judgment on the part of many grandstanding anti-drug crusaders. Rhetoric
has trumped reality in some cases, and sacrificing the career and reputation
of a hard-working athlete to promote some zealot's crusade...well, if and
when that happens, then the cure has become worse than the disease.
We are still awaiting a ruling in the Landis case. I will be very surprised if
they rule in his favor, because they so seldom do overturn the lab findings.
But if his defense team is to be believed--if even half of their allegations
have merit--then his case surely should stand up to the criteria bound up in
our "beyond a shadow of a doubt" justice system. The French lab dropped
the ball repeatedly on this one...did a terrible job with their testing and their
record keeping. No one should be convicted and condemned on the basis of such
slipshod psuedo-science. All fair-minded observers must hope that the appalling
side-show of Greg Lemond's testemony won't distract the panel of judge's
from the core issues of incompetence and irresponsibility on the part of the
testing lab.
All of this speaks to one of the most troubling aspects of the whole drugs-in-sport
swamp: the uncertainty of it all. Given the very real possibility that some tests
might be flawed and some results skewed, it is legitimate to wonder if some riders
are being falsely and unjustly prosecuted (and persecuted). Almost all riders
who test positive protest their innocence, at least for awhile. They always claim
the tests must be wrong. Eventually some cave in and make their confessions and
either retire or serve their suspensions and come back, supposedly sadder, wiser,
and cleaner. But others continue to insist they are innocent. Some of them are
probably lying and will continue to do so forever, taking their secrets to the
grave.
But some of them are probably telling the truth, and this worries me more than
a whole peloton full of drugstore cowboys. Let's please try and remember
this as we rant and rail about cleaning up the sport. Let us be careful not to
destroy the lives of good, honest people in our quest to root out the bad guys.
Meanwhile, because cycling is and always has been misunderstood by those who
don't cycle themselves or who don't follow the sport closely, it will
always be easy for the sport to be held up as an object of ridicule and scorn;
to be scoffed at and trivialized and relegated to the outback of otherness. People
don't have the time or the interest to investigate the subtleties of the
sport. They settle for short-hand, epigrammatic sound bites that pigeonhole the
pastime in some conveniently simplistic niche. And the various media hacks are
more than happy to cater to that need for easy stereotypes. So we end up as the
laughing stock and whipping boy of the sports page, while all the time the Barry
Bonds of this world go on about their pumped-up business, raking in their millions
and laughing all the way to the bank.
So...will it ever end? Who can say? It certainly looks as if it could not possibly
get much worse than it is right now, and that anywhere we go from here must be
an improvement. But we have said that before, after Simpson, after Festina, after
Marco Pantani and Roberto Heras and Rumsas' wife and Basso's dog. Lots
of hopeful people are saying we've turned the corner; hit critical mass.
Others are saying it will only get worse and spiral down the drain into the sewer
now occupied by professional wrestling and cage fighting. Who's right? Where
are we headed? That's one prediction I'm not willing to make right
now.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net