Off With Their Heads, but Have a Heart

ABOUT the Great Balkini 

The Tour de France is the best soap opera in all of sports, and in this day and age, that’s saying something. The three weeks it takes to unfold is just long enough to see as many highs and lows in the peleton as there are on a racecourse that features two mountain chains.

It’s bad that drugs and cheats are everywhere in sports, but it’s brilliant that cycling ferrets them out and dispatches the perps immediately. The spectacular feats of riding that turned out to be illegally fueled are like a giant hangover; giddy fun while going down, but the after effects are sickening. The excruciating unfairness of it -- watching clean riders climbing a mountain while the cheats are working on molehills -- suck the life out of an endurance sport rooted in honest effort and every rider, team manager and sponsor feel it.

From its core this sport is screaming that it wants no part of doping. For proof, look no further than the purposeful embarrassment the TDF heaps on itself as it exposes its unvarnished, ugly side to the world. Cycling’s vigilance and frontier justice is passed over by the mainstream media. Instead, pro cycling has become the poster child for illegal drug use. But is cycling’s very transparency that makes it the perfect whipping boy, and if we forget that it was cycling that turned itself in --- then this sport is doomed.

Isn’t it a double standard that, while other sports routinely use drugs, cyclists can’t? Getting the "walking wounded" back up and in the game requires strong medicine; our culture embraces men and women who play hurt as heroes. Okay, "hero" is too strong a word. But I cheerfully ignore whatever David Ortiz may be doing to play with a bad shoulder. And patching up Tom Brady so he can throw a football on Sundays is also fine by me. But there’s no place for drugs in cycling, we’re told.

Undetectable regimens are the bane of scheduled drug testing, hence the need for out-of-competition (OOC) testing. This is how the year’s yellow jersey, who failed no TDF tests, was sacked at the height of his glory -- not by the officials, whose hands were tied, but by his own team that had everything to lose and did it regardless.

This jerk and every other rider signed a personal code of ethics document that specifically targeted lying to avoid OOC testing. Anyone caught lying gets kicked off the team on the spot. It turns out this jerk was training in Italy prior to the Tour de France, not in Mexico visiting in-laws as he stated.

Michael Rasmussen is the perp. He’s guilty as sin, even though he was not caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It’s circumstantial evidence – but the pantry is off limits; the jar is empty of cookies, and there are crumbs are all over his face. His lie allowed him to avoid an OOC test, and when it was exposed, the only possible explanation is an EPO regimen designed not to show up by the time the Tour de France rolled around.

Nobody tells a lie of this magnitude, a lie that comes with the equivalent of the death penalty, unless there he is hiding something big. No proof? No matter. That will come later. The immediate concern is a level playing field and as honest a result as possible.

Rasmussen lied and his team did their duty. If every team dispatched its well paid, high profile cheats with the same immediacy as pro cycling did in 2007, the sports world would be a better and healthier place.

But it’s not all about dope. The Tour de France soap opera offered another bloody good story line. The pre-race favorite, the cycling superstar and until now my favorite rider, Alexander Vinokourov, tested positive for alien blood. Getting a transfusion in the middle of competition is bizarre; it’s impossible not to get caught. The test is routine, 99% accurate and tantamount to suicide.

Winning the Tour de France was going to be Vinokourov’s swan song. He was The Man. But a crash put him out of contention early, and my guess is, the disappointment of not going out a winner was too much to bear. S like Lucky Pierre, he decided to go down in flames giving the sport the finger on the way down.

FYI, the other rider booted this year was a journeyman domestique from Cofidis (a loan company) but this team took the code of ethics one step further, signing a one-guilty-all-guilty pledge, and withdrawing en masse from the race. For better or worse, all riders, indeed athletes of every stripe, are entangled in a sports medicine web these days. The web is replete with microscopic fine lines. In cycling the best riders are also part-time monks, wholly dedicated to the science of increasing human power on a bicycle. They should not be judged by the sins of their companions.

In defense of pro cycling, my case is fragile, but it stands on its own wobbly legs. The cyclists accused are as guilty as sin, but unlike other sinners, cycling is cleaning up its own act – in public. That deserves kudos, not condemnation.

Vive le Tour!