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All confidence in cycling is lost; if the sport was a horse you’d put it down.
Drugs have riddled cycling from times predating the Tour de France. The first reported death due to performance enhancing drugs took place in a cycling race from Bordeaux to Paris. The year was 1886.
Fast forward 130 years, and it was Lance Armstrong’s implosion which finally brought the sport to its knees, with the explosive news the US Postal Service team were systematically pumping out more contraband than countries south of Texas.
Akin to being born into a family that knows no other way than criminality, the world of elite cycling has developed over this period an almost psychotic dependence on drugs.
As the cheats are finally getting called out, the excuses roll in: “Everyone’s doing it. I’m not a bad guy I’m just trying to keep up with the pack. You can’t finish the Tour de France without it. Armstrong made me do it.”
And the circus rolls on; no fewer than 21 cycling drug cheats have been called to trial for banned substances this year alone.
So how did it get this bad?
The International Cycling Union (UCI) and United-States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) are the toothless, fumbling, non-functional organisations which worked in glorious tandem to allow this to happen.
If the UCI was a parent its kids would end up in juvenile detention.
The organisation has only recently conceded that Armstrong is a cheat, when for 14 years the evidence smacked of someone permanently munching through Erythropoietin pills like a nine year old on a box of Smarties.
In 1999 when Armstrong first won Le Tour, a drug test returned positive for the banned substance Glucocorticoid. This was ignored by authorities as the spin doctors assigned to the US Postal Service team wrote a note to say it was for treatment of a medical condition.
And in August 2005 an old sample taken in 1999 was retested, showing a positive result for EPO. Despite this explosive revelation the UCI ignored the result due to a lack of a second sample.
A payment of $100,000 was made by Armstrong’s company to the UCI in 2005, in what can cynically be described as serendipitous timing. Another payment of $25,000 was made in 2002 supposedly for the betterment of the sport in finding drugs cheats.
Dozens of riders past and present are screaming the man’s guilt and the sheer scale of the problem as permeating every level of elite cycling.
Fast forward to 2012 and eventually some form of intelligence found its way into the USADA, as the organisation finally managed to mount the case against the US Postal Service team and Armstrong.
Lance Armstrong Inc. has now been certified as a scam, and Armstrong himself managed the significant milestone of being labelled the world’s biggest liar.
The reality has hit home that he’s an average rider who’s truly great achievement was getting away with it for so long, despite failed drug tests, blatant bribery and a harem of co-conspirators who at any time could have brought him down.
Of course the piper always gets paid and eventually the creditors got to swooping.
Armstrong has recently been stripped of his titles and prize money, Nike’s jumped ship and a liquidation of his moral assets has begun. He’s been forced to resign as Chairman of Livestrong, the cancer charity he set up in 2004 to silence the screaming of the lambs.
There’s a general sense that the end justifies the means; that Armstrong’s charity has vindicated the cheating. In reality all he’s done is siphon people’s money into his cause, probably diverting these funds from other equally worthy charities.
It’s all a total waste and any contest in this sport will surely now be seen for the farce that it is. Like a magic eye stereogram from the 1990s, the picture of systemic cheating has become so clear to us all that there is going back from this.
The fallout of Armstrong’s legacy, of course, is that future ‘champions’ will have an indelible asterisk etched against their name.
This is unfortunate for a bloke like Cadel Evans, who won the 2011 Tour de France to the immense pride of his country, friends and family. And while there is a possibility he didn’t cheat, the asterisk remains, mounted grotesquely beside the man’s achievement.
The public’s confidence in cycling is now past breaking point as the policing bodies are clearly not up to the task of keeping a clean sport.
The only way to reinstate a credible level playing field in cycling is to allow drugs, and open slather for all athletes.
Until such time, medals in this sport shall be useless as the Insert button on a keyboard.
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