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Year Zero for Tour de France

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Mark Cavendish

Johan Museeuw was a dominant force in world cycling during the mid-1990s and a hero in his native Belgium. A two-time UCI World Cup winner, he also won the world road race title in 1996.

And while his speciality was the one-day classic, Museeuw competed in 11 Tours de France, winning two stages.

But in 2003 he was implicated in a doping scandal. The evidence was not conclusive but Museeuw confessed and received a two-year ban.

So when he told me last month that EPO, a glycoprotein hormone that regulates the production of red blood cells, “almost killed cycling”, I picked up my pen and started taking notes.

You see one of the drugs he was accused of using was a synthetic form of EPO. And EPO, as we have all learned in the last year or so, has been the drug of choice for endurance athletes (not just those on bikes) for at least the last decade.

But having told me just how serious the EPO epidemic was – whilst neatly swerving some follow-up questions about the extent of his drug use and what he knew of others’ use – he said “but enough is enough, it’s time to move on”.

Because for him, cycling had nothing to gain from the public confessions and dramatic mea culpas we have witnessed from some of his contemporaries.

“Cycling is on the right path now,” he told me. “The young guys coming into the sport now know that doping is wrong. But there is no point in all these confessions. They don’t help anybody.”

My initial reaction was to think, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? But as time has passed I have started to think he might be on to something with his draw-a-line-under-it stance because now, finally, the sport’s administrators appear to be taking their responsibilities as cyclist’s moral guardians more seriously.

At the T-Mobile Team press launch on Friday the German outfit’s general manager Bob Stapleton said he was confident that this year’s Tour de France was “cleaner” than previous editions. When asked if it was as clean as he would like it to be he smiled and said no.

The sport has a bad name at the moment but I hope I have proved that you can win cleanMark Cavendish (pictured)
But the former mobile phone entrepreneur was broadly optimistic for the future. He believed the threat of the sport losing its sponsors has had the effect of knocking some heads together.

His team, the pro peloton’s most lavishly funded, has been hit hard by EPO and the fallout from Operation Puerto. In fact, many of the confessions that Museeuw sees no worth in have come from former riders for Telekom, T-Mobile’s fixed-line forbear. Much more of that and nobody would have blamed T-Mobile for hanging up on cycling forever.

But the last 12 months have seen huge changes at Jan Ullrich’s old team. Stapleton has come in, bringing lots of new riders and new ideas with him.

Among those ideas is the most rigorous internal anti-doping programme in professional sport and a watertight code of conduct that allows the team to sack any rider for even the slightest deviation from its tough new stance (as Sergei Honchar recently discovered).

Stapleton admits that the upshot of all this is that his team are unlikely to challenge for the general classification in any of the Grand Tours this year. Read into that what you will.

What he did say was that the team were now “racing the entire calendar” (he mentioned that in recent months a T-Mobile rider has been winning a race every 10 days on average) whilst building for Grand Tour success in the coming years.

He also praised the recent anti-doping efforts of the much maligned UCI, cycling’s governing body. The riders’ declaration has garnered most of the press coverage (and T-Mobile’s riders and managers were the first to sign it) but Stapleton thought the real progress would be made by the “100% Against Doping” programme.

“They have quietly ramped up their testing programme in recent months – targeted and out-of-competition testing – and I think we will see some interesting results from that,” he said, “interesting, and good for cycling in the long run.”

What ties all this together – Museeuw, Stapleton and the UCI – is that they have all identified serious steps were needed and the cycle of cynicism in the sport had to be broken.

Once that was done, cycling could move forward again. Move forward with talented young riders like Mark Cavendish – the young British sprinter that Museeuw identified as a future great, that Stapleton dubbed “the cannonball” and the UCI invited to sign its charter first.

It might be overstating it slightly (because he is clearly not the only young, talented and clean rider out there) but Cavendish, a 22-year-old pocket rocket from the Isle of Man, is the future of pro road racing.

As fast and fearless in the bunch sprints as he is in announcing his commitment to drug-free riding in the peloton (an institution not traditionally known for its transparency and commitment to open government), Cavendish is exactly what cycling needs right now.

His six wins already this season are the perfect riposte to the self-perpetuating logic that you have to dope because everybody else is doping and nice guys come second.

As Stapleton, who admitted to being slightly surprised by Cavendish’s prodigious progress from nervous rookie in winter training to genuine stage-win candidate this month, said: “Mark’s not out there to win friends, he’s out there to win races.”

But by winning those races clean, Cavendish will never go short of admirers.

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comment by artful_blodger (U8920172)

posted Jul 7, 2007

The issue with doping does not revolve around whether professional atheletes should or shouldn't have access to drugs under properly controlled conditions. If they did, chances are it would be done safely, and there would be few, if any health implications. However, once doping is legitimised for professionals, any aspiring young athelete (meaning cyclist, footballer, etc) sees it as the only route to success, creating a vast black market for drug abuse in a completely unsupervised way, which would have devastating health consuquences. Don't try and say a 16 year-old bike enthusiast has the maturity to exercise his 'freedom of choice' in buying the latest EPO that his favourite cyclist is using (akin to buying for example Beckham's football boots...), and dying of a resultant stroke when he dopes himself to the gills.

Whatever one's moral position on wanting to see doped, or undoped atheletes competing, drug taking should never be officially condoned.

Cycling (and Le Tour) is far from clean, but at least stringent efforts are being made to clean it up. Museeuw is right though, the numerous tearful confessions are completely unnecessary (and I have no doubt will be linked to some 'gritty, soul-searchin' autobioraphies...). We all knew they were on drugs, get over it.

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comment by TheInvigilator (U4743667)

posted Jul 7, 2007

Looks like we can add running to the list of sports in denial.
I enjoyed last night's coverage on Eurosport and ITV - what a fine array of young men, no freaks or yobs in those line ups!

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comment by TheInvigilator (U4743667)

posted Jul 7, 2007

Here's an interesting link - admittedly UK only.

http://www.uksport.gov.uk/drugstests/

But perhaps Matt can now see why it's hard to forgive his attack on the Cycling community last year.

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comment by Squaggles (U5420209)

posted Jul 7, 2007

Matt Slater , performance enhancing drugs are used in all sports . Perhaps you haven't heard about all the non-cyclists involved in the operation puerto affair , I can forgive you that as for some reason all we have heard about from that are the cyclists . Does the Juventus team from the mid 90's and EPO use ring any bells ?

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comment by snottysnail (U7280706)

posted Jul 7, 2007

Aside from subjective and arbitrary moralities, there is no difference between taking a performance enhancing drug and using an equally performancing enhancing piece of equipment.

The issue of whether or not an individual condones this or not is entirely indicative of that individual's need to impose his/her will on others.

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comment by Lowlandbrit (U5083598)

posted Jul 7, 2007

TheInvigilator- you know, if you stopped attacking everyone who dares to come on to this board with a prior history of liking other sports we might actually get some people to come on to this board/follow cycling. In the past months Matt has written several (sometimes interesting) articles on cycling, so the golf jokes are getting a bit old. And yes, possibly drugs are rife in other sports, but if that is so then it will surely come out in it's own time. Can't we just allow everyone to enjoy whatever sport they choose to follow?

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comment by quizzical_m4 (U7662917)

posted Jul 7, 2007

Funny, I don't recall saying athletics was clean. Oh look, I didn't!!!!

All the stimulation I NEED is a bowl of porridge.

I work with the assumption that any sprinter who runs dramatically or routinely inside 10seconds for 100m is doped. Similarly any female middle distance runner with shoulders of a middleweight boxer is a likely candidate.

So, anyone else want to try to rip my throat out.

Its been a blast guys, but you're just too sensative. I'll leave you to froth in peace.

BTW the MTB scene looks ok winkeye

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comment by U8154483 - alt id (U8154483)

posted Jul 7, 2007

ANOTHER year zero?
Is it still only 1999?

Could somebody wake me up when men's road cycling really does get near to being clean, please?
Don't waste my time with all this guff about the sport confronting it's doping problem; it's been doing that for 20 years and the only thing that improves is the cheating!

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comment by Spirit-of-McCarthy (U2930457)

posted Jul 7, 2007

The Cyclists need rips in the bum because one is not going to get through Le Tour on orange juice and criossants for breakfast!

Those continentals need to eat properly,get the pan crackling,no wonder they are all thin.The Cycling Teams should get rid of their blinking dieticians and buy the lads some decent grub.

They can confront the doping problems by throwing out some of the orthodoxies that surround sport with regard to nutrition and the war on body fat.

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comment by U8154483 - alt id (U8154483)

posted Jul 7, 2007


Yeah - MORE LARD!

Maybe the odd handful of gravel for flavour. And at the end of each stage, the rider who finished last has to smoke a roll-up, the 2nd last has to smoke 2 roll-ups, and so on up to the winner of the stage

And the riders should pay for the privilege of competing.

Henri Desgrange WOULD approve. Oh yes he would.

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