Doping, Cycling, and Germany

If there's one thing we've learned about professional cycling in the past year(s) is that if a rider's performance seems to good to be true, it probably is. Think of Basso in the 2006 Giro; or Vinokourov's "gritty" victories in last year's Tour; or the cases of especially Ricco and Schumacher this year. Kohl, I guess, too, although I personally didn't immediately suspect him last summer. Too good to be true on the face of it also means: never having a bad day, which reminds me of another prime example: Emanuelle Sella in this year's Giro, especially these back-to-back stage wins in the mountains. All these guys, and others have been caught, although I'm sure there remain others who still get away with it, in part because this will always remain a game of catch up between cheaters and inspectors. There will always be new means to boost performance illegally, and there will always be people willing to try them. But there's no question that cycling is working very hard at making it difficult and potentially very costly to cheat (much harder than many other disciplines). Here's a good source to keep up with the latest on all this (not that I always do). In fact, the tolerance for any infractions has become so limited, that genuinely honest mistakes now also tend to be punished very harshly. What's the name again of the Belgian rider earlier this year who got banned because of a stupid mistake by his doctor or soigneur? I think that's been reversed recently, as it should have been, because in a sport where so much is asked of the body so frequently athletes will always need to rely on doctors and pharmaceuticals just to stay healthy enough to show up for work. (Given the various interests at stake, not showing up for "work" is often highly undesirable, although it should probably be made a little easier at times for a rider just to sit something out, as some of the multi-day races should also be made just a little easier to handle in terms of distance and maybe total number of days). The bottom line is that cycling is doing a lot to make things more honest and transparent. But it doesn't get enough credit, certainly in comparison to other sports. Take the recent developments in Germany, where the main tv organizations now won't televise next year's Tour de France; where the Stuttgart Six-Day track event has just been canceled; and where they now won't have their national tour, the Tour of Germany, next year either. This is all because the sport has lost credibility in the eyes of many Germans, and down with it has gone sponsor interest. Germany is an exceptional case, perhaps because it doesn't really have a long, deeply-rooted cycling tradition. There have been many good German cyclists, but the sport didn't really acquire a mass audience until the 1990s when Jan Ulrich began his tragic rise. It's hard in Germany to put cheating (always has been, always will be part of the sport) in its proper, wider context. Of course, the English-speaking world hasn't really been part of the hard core of the world of (road) cycling either (France, Italy, Belgium--maybe Spain and the Netherlands), but there sponsors seem to view the glass as half-full: much concern about doping, but much support for new anti-doping policies. I'm sure both the German critics and the Anglo-Saxon optimists see themselves as realists. For now, I'm going to side with the latter. With more than 24 hours to go, I'm already excited about watching the Tour of Lombardy tomorrow afternoon.