The Roar
The Roar

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Controversy surrounds the Tour de France, again

Chris Froome.(Source: Team Sky)
Roar Guru
27th July, 2015
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In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past three weeks, or hate the sport of cycling, or are a full-time worker and can’t afford to stay up to ungodly hours, you may not have noticed that Kenyan-born Brit Chris Froome won the Tour de France for the second time on Sunday.

Oh, and he won by taking performance-enhancing drugs, using a motorized bike, cheating teammates, paying fans to interfere with other riders and convincing cows to run across the road in front of his rivals. But no other racer in the peloton, other than Froome’s teammates, cheated in any way, and all other 189 riders were completely clean.

Okay, much of that last paragraph was made up, but as I’m sure you can see, the cycling world has been engulfed by an absolute storm in a teacup for the past fortnight.

It all started after Froome torched his rivals on La Pierre-Saint-Martin, the first Hors Categorie climb of the race on the first stage in the Pyrenees. Froome gained over a minute on his nearest rival, Nairo Quintana, and would never be caught.

It was following this stage that the firestorm surrounding Team Sky began and the rumours of a motorised bike started to emerge.

It may be purely coincidental, but about a week before Le Tour began I read an article about the increasing use of motorised bikes and how difficult it can be to detect motors. The same article also noted how the UCI had started daily random bike inspections to check for motors, but as yet, had not discovered any motorised bikes in professional races.

During the fateful stage I noted to those I was viewing the race with that cyclists had reportedly started using motorised bikes, not in any way suspecting Froome of doing so. Little did I know that by the time I woke up the next morning many would be suspecting Froome of using a motorised bike.

No sooner had the accusations of dodgy bikes subsided than the accusations of performance-enhancing drug use began. This is partly Froome’s own doing, but much of it is not.

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Just a couple of weeks prior to the start of the race, and in the peak of the Mo Farah controversy, Froome admitted that he had missed two drug tests throughout his career, one of which was his fault, another he blamed on overzealous hotel staff refusing drug testers entry.

These missed drug tests occurred five years apart, once in 2010 and once earlier this year, but it was still an interesting admission to make given the dark days cycling has recently emerged from and the accusations that were thrown in Froome’s direction when he won the Tour two years ago.

Usually controversy surrounding an athlete’s seemingly impossible performance quickly blows over as we marvel at the courage or determination of one of the cyclists in the next stage. However this did not happen with Froome as the entire story grew and grew as a new twist in the tale emerged from day to day.

First there was the leaked data from a 2013 climb up Mont Ventoux, then the claims by Team Sky of hacking of confidential data. This was followed by claims that a fan threw urine at Froome, cue doping links, and finally by claims on French TV that Froome’s output, measure in watts per kilogram, on the aforementioned climb up La Pierre-Saint-Martin was higher than any non-doped cyclist had ever recorded. The claims by this show were based on an expert analysis of his performance, not any specific numbers.

This however, forced Froome’s team to release his power output numbers and set the record straight, well that’s what they hoped anyway. The data released by Sky revealed that his output up the climb was 5.78 watts per kilogram, lower than the 7.04 watts per kilo Froome was claimed to have produced by ‘expert’ Pierre Sallet.

Team Sky also revealed that his numbers throughout this climb were lower than 16 different times over the past four years. The immediate conclusion many jumped to is that he has been doping for the past four years. I certainly hope that this is not true.

Regardless of where you stand, if you think Froome is doping or if you think he is clean, the ridiculous thing about this entire scenario is that Froome was the only rider to have been accused of doping.

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There were no such criticisms of runner up Nairo Quintana or his teammate and third place finisher Alejandro Valverde, who orchestrated a pair of sudden and explosive attacks on the final two days of actual racing.

There were no calls for Quintana’s output numbers when he, with the help of Valverde, blew Froome away on the famed Alpe d’Huez on Saturday night. Instead all we hear is that he’s a natural climber, that he’s Columbian and that he’s lived his entire life at altitude.

The way the two are described it’s as if Quintana should be there, but Froome has no right to be leading the race. I hate to bring race into these sorts of things, but there is a possibility that the French disdain towards the English and the fact that a Briton was about to win the United Kingdom’s third Yellow Jersey in the space of four years combined with the fact that a Frenchman hasn’t won the race sine 1985 is influencing this witch hunt.

Cycling is a sport that has been brought to its knees by doping. Not so much the fact that doping occurred, doping has been prevalent in a number of major sports over the past few decades, but the fact that the entire closet of secret vials was revealed in public. The fact that so many of the biggest stars have been caught or admitted to cheating throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.

Because of this, many fans and experts will always be skeptical of the best riders in the peloton, of those who are able to deliver super-human efforts and those who seem to never stop.

This skepticism can be good and it can be bad. It is good for a sport when it drives tightened doping protocols, when it leads to the introduction of blood passports, greater transparency and more informed discussion among experts and fans alike.

It is bad for the sport when any dominant performance is immediately followed by claims and accusations of doping, by mass hysteria, by unsubstantiated claims and uninformed discussion.

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What we initially saw through the second week of the Tour, as Froome and co took on the Pyrenees, was bad for the sport. However, the discussion that began to emerge in the days following Sky releasing Froome’s data was informed and it was good for the sport.

Suggestions that the UCI record all power data and use it in a similar way to the blood passport are good for the sport, despite there being a few minor issues with such a system.

These sorts of discussions can only help the sport move forward and eventually will help other sports move forward with their fights against doping.

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