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.

Nobody wins

Well there it is. Nobody won the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005

Lance A Lot

Zulle, Ullrich, Beloki, Basso & Kloeden

Well, Lance Armstrong stepped down as Chairman of his LiveStrong charity. Last week Johan Bruyneel stepped down as Director of Team RadioShack – Nissan – Trek. Apparently a whole host of former riders and teammates dropped the dime on Lance, including George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Frankie Andreu,  Jonathan Vaughters, Christian Vande Velde and Dave Zabriski. He has subsequently been dropped by Nike and most of his other sponsors.

Now, I personally lean toward Malcomb Gladwell’s view of the scandal, but am completely sympathetic to those who feel that rulz is rulz. Whatever you think of Armstrong, it is a sad day for those of us who love the sport of cycling. Contrary to what some may believe, this will not be good for the sport. Levi has already been fired for his admission. Others will probably suffer.

And this won’t make the sport one bit cleaner. Cheating has been part of the sport since the very beginning, and if you think EPO and blood doping are troubling, just wait till you see gene doping. All the cool kids will be doing it. And we should expect them to. It is not in their interest to do otherwise. And with our ever regenerating innocence we will once again express our eternal outrage that athletes would do everything possible to push their bodies past the natural laws of biology simply to become the idols our culture worships. 

Hey, I’ve got an idea – why don’t we teach our children to worship authors, artists, doctors, engineers and teachers and tell them the last thing we would ever want them to grow up to be is a professional athlete. Or we could admit to ourselves that just like investment bankers, athletes will do anything to win, regardless of the consequences.