Weak Focus

Ullrich and Basso are out with around fifty other cyclists, plus some hundred and fifty more athletes in other disciplines, implicated. Wow. It’s certainly changed the face of the tour this year, but more importantly cycling once again appears a sport of cheats and dopers to the public. I love cycling: watching, competing, training; I love the sport. While I wanted to see Ullrich win this year I was looking forward to seeing the battle no matter who came out on top and it makes me sad I won’t. Did this make the tour a cleaner race? I don’t know. It seems to me that the line between legal training technique and doping is awfully thin and extremely blurry in today’s sports. Cycling seems to look harder at that line than most sports, but I don’t think the public sees it that way.

In the US our sports tend to be monolithic and there’s little incentive to do the kind of probing that goes on in cycling. Until very recently the government wasn’t much interested in getting involved in sports, and even now they’ve done so with more bravado than substance in things like baseball. By contrast in cycling you constantly see France, Spain, etc. take a hard look at the riders. Some of it very obviously comes from poor intentions (Our cyclists are losing, let’s check out the other riders to make sure they aren’t doping to beat us) but it does create more enforcement. Ironically though I think that the public, and certainly Americans, then gets the impression that it’s more pervasive in cycling than other sports because they’re caught more often.

That may be changing what with Barry Bonds, Balco, and the like, but football/basketball/hockey have all remained somewhat untouched. Is it because all those guys are clean? Unlikely, but maybe I’m a cynic. I think it mostly depends on who draws the line and where. Athletes want an edge; it comes with the territory. Sponsors/Owners/Coaches want to win; it makes them money. Fans want more action, more excitement, more drama; we’re part of the problem. We want heros, but these guys are killing themselves to give us that.