Eventually this post will relate to togger, but for the moment bear with me. I’ve wanted to write these thoughts down for a while. This post may well be longer than the Minister’s more pithy rants as well.
Cycling is for me the ultimate sport. It combines the best aspects of every sport, and adds a unique, stunning quality of its own. Yes football will always be my first love, and quite frankly too much cycling would be tedious. However once a year I am reminded that a football game is but a 3 minute pop song when compared to the Mozart symphony of the Tour de France.
Yet once again drugs casts a shadow. Vinokourov was already out of the running by the time he rolled down the ramp for Saturday’s time trial. The thirty or forty stitches he needed after a crash to stop his kneecaps falling on to the road put paid to any chances he had. Yet for whatever reason, he would appear to have someone else’s blood in him on Saturday. I’d love to see the explanation for that. It is still difficult to fathom why he would do this at this point in the race – he really was never going to overcome the deficit he had accrued, particularly as he lost nearly 30 minutes the next day.
The Tour started with drugs being an issue as technically there is still no winner of the 2006 Tour de France. This is because last year Floyd Landis failed a urine sample after hauling back an 8 minute deficit in an otherwise heroic ride. Much of his winning margin was down to the tactical farce that his rival teams acted out that day, but it would appear (subject to a forthcoming judgement) that that little extra bit was down to an injection. And yet, and yet….
David Duffield, Eurosport’s (very) veteran cycling commentator does not believe Floyd Landis would have doped himself. This is because as he put it, it would be suicidal. The day he failed the test was the last chance Landis had to win the Tour. Put simply he had to win that day, and by a significant margin, or lose the Tour. But given that was his mission, the one thing he could guarantee is that he would be dope tested at the end of the day. This is because whether you win a stage or you are leading overall you will be tested (plus 20 or so others each day). The current leader, Michael Rasmussen, has been tested 14 times in 15 competitive days. Three of those have been blood tests. And he will have been blood and urine tested in the days leading up to the start of the Tour. It would appear that for cyclists the testing now revolves not round steroids, masking agents or diuretics, but their very DNA.
So in a way it goes back to what Goethe said – “We see what we look for and we look for what we know.” Perhaps the best that can be said for cycling is that it knows it has a problem, looks for it, and sees it.
Sadly togger does not. (I told you I’d get round to it eventually). The Italian FA dope tests were introduced as a result of the Festina drug scandal in the 1998. They test two players from each Serie A team who have played in each match. It’s perhaps because of this that the Italian FA has caught more high profile cases than any other FA. They would appear to know they have a problem and find it.
Sadly others do not. After all, it is hard to believe that Jaap Stam started to play under the most stringent drugs testing rules in football and only then decided to take drugs. (To stop the Minister breaking out in a nervous sweat, I will point out that I am not suggesting anyone at MUFC or others connected with Jaap Stam would be involved in the supply of performance enhancing drugs).
Equally, while Rio Ferdinand was shinning over a wall at United’s Carrington training ground, David Millar was in a police station admitting to taking EPO despite never having failed a drugs test.
And therein lies the difference – culturally cycling has moved to a point where at least some people will admit without failing a test; football has only recently, and reluctantly signed up to WADA. David Millar had to speak to the police; Rio Ferdinand didn’t speak to anyone. David Millar got banned for 2 years despite not actually failing a test; Rio Ferdinand only got an 8 month ban for failing to even take a test. Team CSC will commission 800 independent drugs tests on their riders this year; the FA does not allow clubs to test their own players at all. Team CSC is putting the results of drugs testing on its website; the latest results on the FA website are for the 2002/2003 season. Vino’s team, Astana, has already left the Tour without waiting for the results of the confirmatory B sample; in contrast can you name an athlete or sports player who has not pushed their case to the very last appeal before accepting the evidence?
However, the FA will tell you that their’s is the better system because it tests at all levels. Actually the number tested in the 12 months 2006-7 was 1645. 1645 out of every single player who played any role within an FA sanctioned game at any level in the country. Given that the top four English leagues make 24,288 player selections between them each season, and approximately 3.6 million people play the game according to Sport England, that is a genuinely pathetic attempt to police a problem. And quite frankly, who gives a monkey’s if the inside left for the Dog and Duck second XI had a bit of blow the night before? I want to know that when I buy my season ticket I’m not paying to watch us win unfairly or lose unjustly.
And to cap it all, I’ve just seen Colin Moynihan saying that British Athletics may look at removing its life ban for those who fail to take 3 drug tests. The point is, Lord Subbuteo, that techology means the dopers are always one step ahead of the testers, but you are infinitely less likely to catch them if there is no punishment for failing to take the test in the first place.
As a wise person said when asked if all cyclists were on drugs, “If only they were, it would make things so much simpler.”
Unlike at least two contributors to this site, I know very little about cycling. I seem to recall watching a well-photographed documentary about some British cyclist or another in the mid-80s entitled Back In The High Life, and I watched the peleton whizz down the Rue de Rivoli in Paris during the final stage of the 1997 Tour de France. (I gather that the final stage is little more than an exhibition and that they don’t race flat out but, bugger me, they weren’t half shifting when I saw them – briefly – that hot Sunday afternoon before I wandered off to the Musee d’Orsay.) But that’s more or less where my knowledge of the sport begins and ends.
I do know that, for all its undoubted spectacle, I consider the very concept of the Tour de France to be crackers. I don’t believe human beings are designed to race up and down 100+ miles of vertical inclines every day for three weeks any more than human beings are designed to run twenty marathons on consecutive days. It’s all well and good for people to quote “not riding the Tour de France on mineral water alone” but any activity that is designed with the express intention to push the human body past its limits – be it distance running, cycling, weightlifting, whatever – is going to mean that some participants will have no option other than to use external measures to allow their bodies to cope.
Like those other sports, cycling is now generally perceived to be a haven for cheats and dopers. There are so many guilty participants that the innocents are tainted by association. Tour director Christian Prudhomme is reported as having said yesterday, “Doping ruins our childhood dreams.” And he’s right: as things stand right now, we just can’t afford emotionally to let our children have heroes in sports like cycling.
As I see it, there are two ways to deal with the issue of drugs in sport.
First, ignore it – let sportsmen do what they want to their bodies, when they want. Accept that there will always be cheats and there will always be idiots prepared to pump themselves full of all kinds of shit. We’ll lose more sportsmen along the way, of course, but then at least everyone will know what they have to do to win medals.
I find that approach abhorrent on every conceivable level – not least that sport is just that, a game. So I would prefer the alternative approach – deal properly with it: rules should apply uniformly and should be applied uniformly. (And I am fully aware of how illiberal my views are on this issue.)
You are absolutely correct to say that technology means that the cheats will invariably be a step ahead of the testers but there are two things you can do to try to deal with drugs – introduce a proper regime of testing and ban miscreants.
Settle neither for the cop out of allowing Michael Rasmussen to ride in the Tour knowing he has missed four drugs tests nor the half-hearted, limited suspensions of the likes of Rio Fucking-Ferdinand. If you miss a test, you should be out of the sport for life.
Similarly, all athletes found to have foreign or performance enhancing substances in their bodies should be thrown out of sport for life. It would avoid the nonsense of allowing people like Ben Johnson back into athletics after a couple of years of crocodile tears. It would stop pathetic arguments about having high testosterone levels because the “athlete” had been shagging all night.
Sportsmen should have to sign up to no cheating at the outset of their careers and should be made to pay proper financial penalties if they do cheat – if they are found to have cheated or evaded the testing procedure, they should have to hand back all training grants, all appearance and prize money earned and they should be out for good. If that means cheating bastards are made bankrupt, so be it. Proper sanctions WILL have a proper deterrent effect – but it will NOT end doping. We live in a chancer’s paradise and wherever there is money or celebrity, chancers will remain.
Much as I love the sport, I am not going to seek to defend football’s refusal to take the issue of drugs seriously. Bugger defamation – I firmly believe some of football’s highest administrators are too corrupt to do anything about anything that jeopardises the commercial popularity of the game and unless and until that changes we can expect to hear of the occasional lower-level player getting a slap on the wrist for doing a bit of Charlie, but that’s it. Governing bodies that do not properly police their sports are shameful and, yes, FIFA, FA, FL and FAPL – that means you.
A lot of good stuff has been said here and many a place else (particularly Richard Williams’ column in the Guardian) about this most vital subject. I want to say my bit about cycling, which I came to through following the Tour.
As most of us contributors are people who adore sport, we have something in common when it comes to drugs. The issue threatens us because a) it threatens the sports we love and b) it is very hard to know how to deal with it effectively, even if we were able to agree on what needs to be done in the first place.
I grew up with the Tour because I spent every summer of my childhood with my French family in France. I went to watch the Tour go by nearby towns at le Puy-de-Dome and St Christophe-en-Brionnais as a child. I also saw it go by my house in Petersfield in the early 90s. In later life, I grew to better understand the nuances and tactical precisions which to hardcore sports fans make the sport of cycling so attractive and the Tour perhaps the ultimate sporting event.
For a French person, the Tour is every much an institution as a Lord’s test match, the Open, Wimbledon and the FA Cup Final are for the English. It has the excitement, the colour and the historic meaning of those events. But it also has something more than the others – the stamp of genuinely great human athletic accomplishment. As the Minister says, it’s crackers.
The problem is not that drug cheats are threatening the Tour’s existence. Any more than a bout of match-fixing could cancel the World Cup. They cannot do that. They cannot be afforded that much power and the Tour is bigger than these people. The problem, for me, is that when these things happen, it tarnishes the event for fans and it destroys its credibility for future fans. My 9 year old son has the yellow TdF jersey and cap and watches the excellent ITV coverage with me. He doesn’t understand the issue even when I explain it to him as best I can. My colleagues at work (not cycling fans) don’t want to listen to me talk about it because they think it’s worthless now.
But what makes the Tour the Tour is its mass worldwide appeal. It has the largest live audience of any single sporting event or tournament in the world. Millions more watch on TV. To people who are not cycling fans, this story is the most destructive. What makes me mad is that THIS IS CAUSING PEOPLE TO SAY THAT CYCLING IS BOGUS, THE TOUR IS POINTLESS AND THAT THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THESE ATHLETES ARE NOT WORTHY OF THEIR RESPECT. This hurts more than anything because it’s so wrong. And if it hurts me, how do you think the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Sebastien Chavanel and Tor Hushovdt feel? Cycling fans can’t abide when their sport, which has strong arguabke claims to being the ultimate, becomes an underappreciated laughing stock. Never mind sailing around the world, or doing 3 marathons through the desert, this is the ultimate test of endurance that there is (and that’s before we even get to the tactical battles that rage at each stage). Let’s not forget that even the guilty parties like Michael Rasmussen (who can be spotted half way up an Alp in the middle of winter and counts the number of pieces of pasta he eats), are driven obsessives. Pure professionals. They don’t cheat because they are lazy. They cheat because they’ve taken their bodies to the absolute limit and they want to go even further.
Drugs will never ruin cycling for the true fans. What they will do is destroy the sport’s credibility for the world at large and that’s what threatens the Tour. We’re all agreed that something big needs to be done. I will only add my own thoughts in brief:
1) Cycling made a knee-jerk mistake in the 1990s in thinking it had to apply the same rules to the Tour as the IAAF applied to its athletes. This is simplistic thinking. A certain amount of controlled drug taking ought to have been allowed from the start and a particularly large rod has been made for its own back (which it is stuck with and has to live with). But the sophistication of modern pharmaceutical technology means that proper control and regulation should have been there for decades. The UCI (Union de Cyclisme International) the equivalent of FIFA, not only cocked up when they brought in the rules, they utterly failed to enforce them properly afterwards. There are similarities with football here but in my view, football cannot afford to investigate its drug problem properly because the scale of the problem is so enormous, that everyone involved would lose money. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
2) The Tour has to break away from UCI, make itself a private, elitist, invitation only event, bring in national teams with public funding or approved sponsorship and heavily regulated, vetted and permanently supervised private teams. Anyone with any past record or associated with any boss, trainer, doctor or rider who has even been investigated doesn’t come within a million miles of an invitation. Watch every cheating cyclist and corrupt team boss shit their fucking pants as they realise their careers are finished. Then see how many people are tempted to try the needle.
3) The testing system is under as much suspicion as the riders. This is an entirely personal view. I happen to believe that Floyd Landis, for example, is innocent, and that his sample was improperly tested. Do I think he should be reinstated? No. Does he think he should be reinstated? No. He accepts that he won’t be now but has said that he now wants to expose the flaws in the testing system and reduce the possibility of miscarriages of justice happening again. Everyone questions the athletes (even when it doesn’t make any sense that they would cheat) but I have seen a staggering lack of proper journalism around the testing and this is a massive scandal in its own right. If you are talking about people’s careers, you have to be above any margin of error whatsoever.
Every sport has scandals that force change. But great sports, and great events, never die. They can’t. They change as well. Time for Year Zero.