Rope-a-dope

In 2004 I went to Belgium to watch a certain man from Texas ride around Europe in his tights. I saw the first five stages of that year’s Tour de France. I watched the prologue in Liege from a bridge over the Meuse river. Do you recall who won that prologue? An obscure young racer called Fabian Cancellara. That’s right - Spartacus hisself! But as we now know, nobody actually won the race that year. Interestingly, nobody won second in the Mountains classification or eighth in the Points classification either.

There has always been cheating in cycling and there always will be. Right from the very first Tour. Hell, doping predates the Tour. It's one of the most venerable traditions in the sport! And the youngsters these days have no imagination at all, what with their vampiric transfusions and the E-P-O. 

Was there a rule against putting your bike on a train?

Now everything in the sport hangs by a thread. Money will abandon the teams (Rabobank already gone!) and the riders will all be suspected of doping. Perhaps professional cycling will somehow rise again from the ashes after several years of mea culpas in the wilderness. I don’t know.

Maybe we will forget again. Maybe we will stop caring. In the coming days of gene doping we will look back on the era of blood doping and EPO as quaint. I don’t know what can be done about it all.

I think I’ll just go ride my bike.