“The greatest fraud in American sports”. I’d add in cycling too, and unfortunatly just the last… I think that this last boulder fallen on cycling has killed “a dead man”.
Cycling was definly killed many and many years ago - too many years ago - by doping. This last scandal envolving a “champion” winner of 7 Tour de France is unfortunatly yet another of many. Also this cycling champion was a fake champion, a paper hero of chemicals chats; last one following many.
I think everyone appreciates the right strictness shown by the International Cycling Union, with the guilty disbarred for life; but this sport has lost every reliability so much time ago, that the Armstrong’s case is only the last atomic bomb over a field of rubble. What future for this sport in complete decadence from the times of Bartali and Coppi, Anquetil and Merckx (perhaps the last true biggest champion)?
I agree that it’s a sad state of affairs for any professional sport, and even the higher level amateur sports that trickery is showing its presence. What ever happened to doing something just for the good of it? I remember Eddy Merckx, and I rode a Coppi Campianissimo for a few years (though many, many years ago) a truly beautiful bicycle,a work of art. Would that today’s riders had the integrity of their bikes.
It’s sad and disappointing. I recall Greg Lemond ripped into Armstrong during Lance’s string of victories saying he heard that they were tainted and that there was a vast, cycling-wide conspiracy to avoid doping tests that was very sophisticated…
A terrible shame. I am not exactly a cycling fan - see little point in standing at the side of the road, waiting for the cyclists to flash by - but, at the same time, I am lost in admiration for anybody who earns their living in this brutally tough sport, especially the unsung heros of the “domestique” level. That is - unless they distort the whole business by taking performance-enhancing drugs. I have heard the argument that, if they all take them, perhaps competition cyclists (and indeed other sportspersons) should be allowed to get on with it. There are, however, a number of problems with this. For example, it would be one thing to allow professional sportspersons to endanger their health by taking potentially dangerous performance enhancers; quite another if their example is followed by youngsters wishing to follow in their footsteps. We already seem to have a problem with underage Rugby players taking muscle enhancing preparations that may not be conducive to their long-term health. More immediately - would cycling, or other sports, fans really like to think that the whole sport ends up being as much a contest between sports pharmacists and doctors as it is between the actual contestants ? I am reminded of “Private Eye” magazine’s old joke about a fictitious Soviet Olympic team doctor - “Anaboly Stearov, Professor of Sports Medicine at the Moscow School of Clinical Pharmacology”, or something like that. Hold on - was he really that fictitious ? The cycling authorities claim that, while there are still problems, they have a much better handle on the drug abuse business than was the case in the “Armstrong Era”. For cycling’s sake, I hope they are right, because another major round of scandals must suggest, even to Continental cycling fanatics, that the sport is beyond reform. Best regards, JR.