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Dopey excuses are getting old

Roar Rookie
9th November, 2014
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Roar Rookie
9th November, 2014
17
1205 Reads

Oh cycling, I love you, but I hate you.

2014 is one of the “new cycling” years, basically like 1998.

The blood passport has caught out the cheats (unless you read that Bernard Kohl interview where he says it actually helped him cheat, bit awkward), the culture has changed and nobody in Le Tour tests positive.

I mean, sometimes athletes test positive but it’s usually because they took a sports supplement which was contaminated.

What a tragedy for the athlete. We all make mistakes I guess and forgiveness is the christian thing to do.

But enough facetiousness. The thing that has spurred me to write this piece, is this article from SBS.

It’s about Ben Hill, who just won a stage of the Tour of Southland and how he has come back from suspension.

Hill tested positive from an amphetamine which he says he believes came from a pre-workout supplement called Jack3d (pronounced “jacked” as in “hey bra I’m so jacked from my pre-workout I just smashed out a 100-kilogram bench, check my delts, you mirin bra?”).

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So this is really what has become the standard excuse for doping positives, from Frank Shcleck to Daryl Impey, the silly mistake, the contaminated supplement.

But let’s look a bit deeper into Hill’s story.

Firstly, Jack3d. It was a supplement which was basically marketed as being illegal, or at least on the edge of what’s not classified as a poison by the government. This is a great marketing technique when your customers are gym junkies with body-dismorphia who might already be taking actual banned substances like anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.

So already as a professional athlete who is getting tested you’re taking on a lot of risk by taking this particular substance.

However, Jack3d, along with a number of other popular ‘pre-workout’ products, was in fact banned on August 2 in 2012 by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

The Tour of Tasmania in 2012 was run from October 2-7. So Hill’s teammate was carrying around basically an illegal drug, two months after it was announced as such.

According to Hill, he and his teammate looked up the supplement after Hill was tested. As a professional athlete in 2012, in cycling, with the Lance Armstrong controversy in full swing, it is impossible to imagine that you would not research substances or supplements before putting them in your body.

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Ben Hill, smart enough to win bike races, not smart enough to use Google?

The other worrying aspect of this story is that Hill says he called ASADA two days after his test and that they backdated his suspension to the day of the phone call.

Hill was suspended on October 10, 2012, ToT finished on the seventh, so he was tested on the last stage. So his teammate has been carrying around stimulant-laden Jack3d for the entire tour, and it’s safe to assume at $70 or so a tub that he has been using it.

So did Hill’s teammate go positive as well? And if not, does that bring up questions about the NRS and how good the testing is?

So there are my feelings on the tale of Ben Hill. They are pretty much the same as my feelings on the story of Mick Rodgers, Daryl Impey, Frank Schleck, Stuart O’Grady… the list goes on.

Elite level cyclists are feeding fans the same lines over and over, clean cycling, changed culture etc. But it doesn’t take much for these stories to fall apart.

This leads me nicely to my next target for scorn, shoddy sports journalists.

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The whole SBS Ben Hill article paints the guy as a victim who is thankfully on the mend. With a little bit of research and critical thinking Hill’s story becomes very suspect, how is it that this professional journalist has just printed up their interview without any further thought?

Australian cycling fans and journalists are smarter than to just eat up stories like this. I understand why so many people might be motivated to ignore the doping scourge in cycling, but let’s be serious, the sport isn’t going to survive a third Festina-Lance Armstrong level scandal.

The sponsors will go and the rest will be history.

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