Since I have a lot of non cycling friends and just about the only thing they know or hear about cycling has to do with either, Lance Armstrong, doping or the question of whether or not Lance doped, I am often answering questions about the state of doping in cycling. I am far from an expert on this matter so I always lead with a disclaimer that says just that.
I often wrestle with this topic because I can’t view it from a simple angle. Cycling for a very long time was dominated by dopers because the drugs were so far ahead of the tests it was literally impossible to get caught. In my opinion when you are a young pro entering the professional peloton during this era, if you want to compete, you dope. If you don’t, you don’t compete and therefore making an irresponsible economic decision if this is the way you want to make your living. This line of logic has always made it very hard for me to fault cyclist, or any professional athlete for doping. Given the same scenario I’m pretty sure I’d dope 99 out of 100 times I had to make that choice.
In today’s modern peloton there is a huge fight against doping, which I think all in all is a good thing. I’d rather look at a pros output and data from a stage and compare it to my own and know that this guy is riding clean. Clearly his numbers will still be astronomically higher than mine, but its still sort of fun. A few teams are running independent drug testing throughout the season that seems to be working well. None of their guys are testing positive anywhere and I guess we should assume everybody is innocent until proven guilty.
However, I still think we’d be foolish to assume that every cyclist is now riding clean just because it seems to be the thing to do. This past week this year’s Tour de France had its first positive dope test by a big name that actually mattered. The following is an article that Bill Strickland posted on his blog, Sitting In, as a response to the Ricco positive. He sums it up about 100xs better than I ever could. I guess that’s why he gets paid to write and I don’t. Hopefully for any of my non-cycling friends, this insight lends a bit of insight as to why its always so hard for me to answer your doping related questions.
If you were surprised by Ricardo Ricco, you had to work hard to do it. And if you don't appreciate him, you're missing the point.
by Bill Strickland
I think it’s great that Riccardo Ricco shot himself so full of the new generation of EPO that he lost all sense and loosed those heartbreakingly ridiculous attacks that won him Stages 6 and 9.
Those of us who witnessed those exploits and didn’t know that Ricco was doping had either never watched a Tour de France before, or had somehow found a way to sustain an admirably willful ignorance (which I guess arises from a kind of hope as sweet and doomed as a puppy love crush, or from the utopian delusion that we can somehow rewind the course of modern life to free ourselves from its scourges).
I mean, Ricco was, literally, unbelievable, the way he was riding those mountains, his hands down in the drops, sprinting away from the best climbers in the world, up out of the saddle and pouncing on the steepness of the grade whenever his pace slacked, and the way he threw his arms in the air at the line each time, as if presenting himself to us rather than celebrating.
The man was stuffed with dope, and at this point in the life of professional bike racing — in the life of our culture — I think we need to stop pretending we’re outraged. Remember when we, as a society, could still be surprised by the antics of the cast of the Real World, or Survivor, or Big Brother, or American Idol (or our government)? We no longer tune in to reality shows to be shocked by alcoholics, or racism, or threesomes or whatever we might consider taboo; we watch, if we do at all, to see how the drama will unfold this time, with this group, with all the past seasons as context for participants as well as spectators.
Look: We all knew, at least those of us who wanted to, that Ricco was so juiced it was running out of his ears. And thanks to the new policy that lets the dope-control program target suspicious riders (which replaced the useless random tests), as well as the willingness of sponsors to break their deals and take back their cash, we’re finally past the point where the cheaters more or less get away with it; the 1990s and the first years of this century made for unsatisfying sport not because people cheated but because the cheaters often won — a fundamental difference that seems to make a lot of difference to us, as if we humans simply aren’t built to tolerate unfair victory, no matter if the arena is a backgammon board or a bike race.
The question wasn’t if Ricco was doping, but how his story would play out — when he would get caught, what he would do then, what kind of havoc he might wreak to the GC before he got busted. . . For me, the dopers have become part of the theater of the Tour de France, another subplot to the drama that — I’m just going to go ahead and say this — adds to my enjoyment.
I like listening to Amy Winehouse more because she actually did go to rehab. I like Jimi Hendrix more because he had so much talent he just couldn’t live with it. A Confederacy of Dunces is better because John Kennedy Toole killed himself, just the way the last pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls are so damn good because Hemingway eventually went to pieces just like Robert Jordan. I’m not saying it’s okay or right or necessary or even worth it that those people, or anyone, suffer and live in pain. I’m just being honest about my belief that, at least sometimes, the creator’s life can enrich the art – or the sport.
Because I felt sure Ricco would get caught, I felt free to enjoy his performance. He was beautiful when he rode, and he was doomed, and he carried around a picture of Marco Pantani. I love the quote he gave, after he won Stage 9: “I was impressive, I went very fast.” It reminded me of a stoner saying, “I’m so high,” as if he, too, had become a spectator to the feats of his own body, as if he were standing outside of himself somehow and couldn’t hold back his own wonder at what was happening.
What part of Ricco knew he was going to get caught? What was it like to live inside that knowledge? How does it feel to win in shame? Or to bury the shame? Is it worth the loss of the thing you do best in life, the thing you were born to do, to know how it feels to ride like an angel just once? And what about Manuel Beltran, at the end of a long career, with what hope, desperation, desire did he stare into the needle?
The dopers are never going to go completely away. Not ever. But now that we can catch them (and now that a clean guy is going to win) they’ve become more interesting to me. I never wanted them to triumph, but I don’t want them to vanish, either. The sport, the Tour, the world is richer thanks to screwed-up people.
