It is no secret that the sport of cycling has a chequered past. We now know that throughout the 1990s and early 2000s doping was widespread in the sport.
The sport is now as clean as it has ever been and it’s time we moved on.
Lance Armstrong came out in an interview last week and said that if he had his time over, he’d dope again. As usual, the Armstrong circus once again brought doping to the forefront of the cycling community. And unsurprisingly Armstrong’s comments were largely taken out of context by the media.
Champion British sprinter, Mark Cavendish was asked by a journalist during a press conference if he was 100 per cent sure that none of the men he was racing against were doping.
Cavendish responded with a crude line that I’m not going to repeat. And while ‘Cav’ has often been seen as someone who can polarise with what he says, his response here was one of a man sick of the doping questions, rumours and innuendos.
Okay, what he said probably wasn’t the best way to go about it but it seemed that his frustrations finally got the better of him.
At the same time we were treated to some terrific racing in the Tour Down Under. An all-Australian podium saw Rohan Dennis finish ahead of Richie Porte and teammate Cadel Evans showed just how strong Australian cycling is right now. Unfortunately the fantastic racing was yet again overshadowed by doping.
Last Thursday Triple M interviewed the voice of cycling, Phil Liggett. I was looking forward to hearing Phil’s analysis of the business end of the Tour Down Under. Instead, for about six or seven minutes he was left to defend the sport in regards to doping questions from those three ‘dopes’ on the Grill Team.
You could sense that Liggett wasn’t enjoying the discussion. He’d come on to discuss Australia’s biggest cycling event and was left to defend the sport he loved.
He did, I believe, manage to put those three back in their places when he quoted an interesting statistic.
“59 Kenyan long distance runners were banned from competition due to doping in 2014.”
59. That’s about a third of the field for the Tour de France. Yet there was barely a peep out of the media.
According to Liggett, there was half a page on it, buried somewhere in the back pages in one of London’s newspapers.
I certainly didn’t see anything in the Australian media.
Had that been 59 cyclists, it would have been front page, back page, a story on 60 Minutes and everything in between.
Doping happened, we can’t get away from that fact. It’s a sad chapter in the sport. But that chapter is closed.
It’s time for the media to back off and let bygones be bygones. The sport can’t completely recover from the 90s and early 2000’s if, in every second interview, a journalist is asking about doping.
Armstrong could do cycling a favour by fading into the background and accepting that what he did was wrong.
Is doping still happening in the sport? I don’t know. I’m not a professional cyclist and I have no connection to any of the teams.
There are rule benders and breakers in every sport. You only need to look at the ASADA scandal involving Cronulla and Essendon.
But is doping as widespread as it once was? No. Testing has become a lot better, rules stricter and the UCI more transparent and accountable than it once was.
This continual pursuit by journalists of finding the next big doping story is only going to make cyclists more suspicious of the media.
It’s time to call off the witch hunt and let cycling continue to repair itself.
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