Dopes

It's very rare that I comment on pro-cycling these days -- having virtually lost all interest in the racing scene in recent years for a variety of reasons. I'll probably watch the Tour de France this year, but I doubt I'll get as excited about it as I have in previous years. Personally I'd much rather be riding my own bike. However, since I'm confined to my office at this moment, and forced to put up with looking out my window at the rainbow over Surfers Paradise rather than riding in it, I'll take a minute to post this rant.

It seems that over the last decade or so, the sport of cycling has been unable to escape the stigma of doping. The latest was this story in which 1996 TdF winner Bjarne Riis admits to having used EPO. This will, of course, come as a surprise to nobody who has ever taken notice of professional sport and taken the rose-coloured glasses off for long enough to see the reality of it. Yet for some reason there are still people around who find it surprising. Perhaps the most surprising thing about all this is that in the last decade, the UCI hasn't learned how to sweep this all under the carpet the way so many other sports have.


At around the time of the "Festina affair" in 1998, there were revelations in another part of Europe concerning another major sport. Then AS Roma (an Italian football club, or "soccer" team to the less cultured among us) coach Zdenek Zeman made a comment basically stating that the vast majority of players in the Serie A league were using performance-enhancing drugs. That same year, the National Rugby League had a heap of players test positive to steroids -- most of the Newcastle Knights team who won the premiership the previous year I believe. Yet how much hype do we hear over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in these sports today? Virtually none as far as I can see.

In fact, I remember doing my final year of schooling at a school that had a lot of rugby league players trying to get contracts with NRL clubs. These people would literally take steroids in class (disguised to look like headache tablets), with nothing being done about it. I would have assumed a coach somewhere would have been aware of it, but nobody ever said anything. As far as I know, it's probably still happening now.

Of course, right now we're hearing stories about drug problems in the Australian Football League in the southern states -- I'd be surprised if officials hadn't known about that for years. There are all sorts of rumours and innuendo about countless other athletes who, in the mean time, are able to continue competing regardless. It was these rumours and innuendo that led to half of last year's Tour de France riders being suspended if I recall correctly.

The point of all this is that cycling is by no means the only professional sport in the world with a problem here -- yet for some reason the UCI have this desire to air their dirty laundry in a place where nobody can escape it. Incidentally, doesn't Riis now look like a dickhead after earlier sacking Ivan Basso over a drugs issue.


Let's face it, drugs are simply a fact of professional sport, and of life generally, and the fans who turn up and demand that the athletes go faster every race are as much to blame as the administrators and the athletes themselves. After all, many of the same fans probably go home and take a stack of pills every Monday morning when they wake up with a hangover that might keep them off work for the day, or feed their kids a heap of pills because they made too much noise during the night. Yet these people can suddenly find a reason to get very sanctimonious every time they hear of an athlete doing the same thing that they themselves do.


I know for a fact that when I was at University there were a heap of students who took drugs to try to make themselves "more alert" for the exams, and let's not forget that "doctor" on the Gold Coast last year who was selling various drugs to wealthy old men who had married younger women that they could no longer physically keep up with. With all this going on, one has to ask just why everyone suddenly tries to put athletes up on some kind of pedestal and suddenly expect them to rise above all this as if they have super-human morals.

I am by no means saying that taking drugs is "right" or "proper". What I am saying is that it is simply unrealistic to expect professional cyclists (or any other athletes for that matter) to refuse to take drugs to "get ahead" when the rest of society has no problem in doing just that. Fix the problem of drugs in society, and you might fix the problem of drugs in sport. However, simply pointing the finger at a group of athletes and ridiculing them as if they're the only ones is not going to make it magically go away.