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 by: Bill Oetinger  11/1/2012

Time to move on

I've debated long and hard with myself about whether to address the topic of doping in the peloton. It has been so extensively, exhaustively covered in both the cycling and mainstream media in recent weeks that I doubt I have anything new to add. And frankly, I'm pretty much bored to death with the subject. My eyes glazed over about three years ago on this one, and I have long since stopped reading even half of what's being written about it.

So why am I adding one more article to the pile? Probably just to get it out of my system, once and for all…pay a bit of lip service to the topic and then move on.

I actually had planned a rather heated rant when the first tsunami of news broke about Lance's effective nolo contendere and the USADA's decision to strip him of his seven Tour de France titles and all his other wins and honors. I had not much doubt at that point that Lance was guilty of doping. The circumstantial evidence was too overwhelming. But I didn't like the general idea of going backward in time to try folks in the court of history. I mean, if you can go back and nail Armstrong, why not go further back and drill Eddy Merckx? Why not Fausto Coppi? Jacques Anquetil? On an on… Where would you stop?

And the forms of punishment seemed somewhat iniquitous. For example, the three prior winners of the Tour de France--prior to Lance's run--(Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, and Marco Pantani) are all known to have been chronic dopers during their careers, and yet their names still stand in the record books as the winners of the '96, '97, and '98 Tours. Riis even admitted he doped during that tour, but he remains unpunished.

Riis is an especially egregious case in point, for not only did he dope himself, he was an alleged enabler for many riders who raced under his guidance as a Directeur Sportif at various teams, right up to the present. He appears to be just about as dirty and as culpable as they come, but as yet has weathered the storm and appears unrepentant and unpunished. Following his 2007 admission of using an array of banned substances during his TdF victory, his name was expunged from the records. But a year later, it was quietly reinstated, with just an asterisk added and footnotes about his doping. Why does he get to keep his tainted TdF victory while Armstrong is cast out into the darkness?

There is also the question of what would the podiums at the Tour de France look like if Armstrong were removed for those seven years, from 1999 to 2005. I was at first upset about the injustice of this too, although subsequently the UCI and the TdF organizers have announced that they will not elevate the second through fourth place riders to higher steps on the podium, now that Armstrong is gone; they will simply leave things as they are, with Armstrong's name crossed out. The suits at the UCI and TdF are not stupid: they could figure this out as well as any of the rest of us. That may be better than elevating the riders below him, but it's still far from a satisfactory situation, as so many of those below him are equally tainted by drug use.

Perhaps you've already considered this, but if you haven't, this is what the podiums of those seven Tours would look like with Lance removed…

1999: 1. Alex Zulle, 2. Fernando Escartin, 3. Laurent Dufaux

2000: 1. Jan Ullrich, 2. Joseba Beloki, 3. Christophe Moreau

2001. 1. Jan Ullrich, 2. Joseba Beloki, 3. Andrei Kivilev

2002. 1. Joseba Beloki, 2. Raimonda Rumsas, 3. Santiago Botero

2003. 1. Jan Ullrich, 2. Alexandre Vinokourov, 3. Tyler Hamilton

2004. 1. Andreas Klöden, 2. Ivan Basso, 3. Jan Ullrich

2005. 1. Ivan Basso, 2. Jan Ullrich, 3. Francesco Mancebo

If you know your racing history, you know where I'm going with this: every single person on that list, except one, has been convicted of or implicated in the use of banned drugs. The one exception is Andrei Kivilev, and he was killed in a bike crash in 2002, just nine months after he earned his spot on this list. One shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but you don't have to be too cynical to guess that he only escaped being busted because he wasn't around long enough to get caught. After all, his best friend was Vinokourov, one of the most notorious dopers of the era.

I have to wonder how justice is being served that all of these other dopers get to hold onto their placings while Armstrong is left twisting in the wind.

Hey, I'm no great Lance Armstrong fan. I used to celebrate his achievements in these columns. (If you go back far enough, you can find reviews of each of his TdF victories in my archives at this site.) I was as thrilled as any fan--at least any American fan--about his dominating, dramatic wins, especially overlaid with the compelling cancer saga. It's a great story, one that should have resounded down the generations…a latter-day Lou Gehrig. But as much as I wanted to root for him and embrace his success, over the years, I began to feel a bit uneasy about his racing and about him as a person. Lots of other people I know found him unlovable right from the start. I tried to understand and support him…to give him the benefit of the doubt. But it grew increasingly difficult to do so, pretty much like being a SF Giants fan and getting behind Barry Bonds, another remarkably unlovable hero (who has now become an avid road cyclist, by the way).

But I was still willing to go to bat for Armstrong with respect to true, blind justice. It did seem as if a witch hunt were under way, with one very high-profile and rather unlovable icon being singled out from a herd of others, all of them as guilty as he was. If weeding out the dopers is about bringing fair play and equity to the sport, then it seemed wrong--not fair--to just nail his ass to the wall and let all the other folks walk.

But then the news broke of the USADAS's Reasoned Decision in September, with the sworn testimony--and confessions--of so many well-known and well-respected riders, from Levi Leipheimer to George Hincapie. That changed the conversation considerably. From what appeared to be a vindictive witch hunt after one superstar, it now looked more like a mass catharsis, with--ultimately--therapeutic, remedial results.

The Levi admissions were especially newsworthy in our area, where the man is revered as one of the most popular and influential citizens of Santa Rosa. The news stories coincided exactly with the fourth annual running of Levi's King Ridge GranFondo charity bike ride, which has, in those few years, become one of the biggest sporting events in the North Bay…a huge net-positive for the community.

The local paper jumped all over the story, with most of the October 11 front page devoted to it. In addition to the main story, they ran one on local reactions from cycling fans around the area. A reporter called me and we chatted for a good 15 minutes. He wanted to know if I was shocked or disappointed. The quote of mine they published was this: "You'd have to be pretty naive to be shocked by this. It's disappointing, but I think most of us in the cycling community have expected something of this sort for some time, not just for Levi but for all of the other riders. Almost every other sport has the same problems. It's a big mess, but probably for the best. We're getting to the point where young riders have a better prospect of rising through the sport without having to consider that as an option."

That's a fair summary of what I said to the reporter, and I stand by it. I hope I'm not being naive to think that maybe we are getting to a point where we can indeed move beyond that culture of dope-or-go-home. But that's my take-away from the mass confessional of all those riders. (Others have now joined the ones in the original testimony, most recently Bobby Julich…another product of the Bjarne Riis machine.)

I always hated the way one rider would get busted and would wriggle and squirm, with this denial or that, and finally come clean (sometimes), while all around them, the rest of the dirty riders kept doing the same thing. This feels better: this mass confessional, with all the details laid bare. I want to believe it will make a difference. Better testing and biological passports will help too.

Am I mad at these guys for faking us out, year after year? Not really. Mostly I feel sorry for them. They each made a Faustian bargain and they have been living with the consequences of that for all of their professional lives, probably all knowing that, sooner or later, it would catch up with them. It can't have been fun.

That leaves Lance still out there. He's painted himself into such a corner at this point, who knows how or when or where he will sort it out? I can tell you: I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now, even if it meant I could go uphill as fast as he can.

There has been a lot of discussion on our club's chat list about this, as you might expect. Some have been apologists for the dopers. Others have been righteously indignant and unforgiving. But a good many people have said, in effect: who cares? Racers, either clean or dirty, are not the face of cycling for them. The face of cycling is all of us, getting out there on our own bikes, doing that two-wheeled dance to the best of our abilities…having fun, feeling fit (more or less), and reveling in the wonderful world around us.

I'll second that and add this: there is way more to life than bike racing. As much as I love it, it's just a divertimento, an entertainment…and only one entertainment among many. (Right now, I'm way more excited about the SF Giants amazing race through the post-season…not least their decision to leave their own doper, Melky Cabrera, off the roster.) I will always love the spectacle and drama of bike racing, and I will probably write more columns about it in the future, whether it's clean, dirty, or somewhere in between. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over these poor saps who felt compelled to win at all costs. Let others sit in judgment on them. I don't care. It's time to move on...

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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