"With the competition reduced to an afterthought, the Tour de France was rocked by another drug bust Thursday that left cycling's showpiece event all but synonymous with doping." - Jamey Keaten, AP (found in Eugene Register-Guard, 7/18/2008 p. C3)
With the 2009 Tour de France starting in less than forty-eight hours, the sports world awaits anxiously as the most-tested athletes in the world come under their greatest period of intense public scrutiny. The world's press, usually reticent to follow the sport of cycling except in those European hotbeds where it remains the king of summertime pastimes, descends on the Tour route like so many vultures. Perhaps there is a national favorite to follow. Perhaps a national newspaper feels the need to provide some in-house coverage (which probably means a cycling fan on staff wanted a comped trip to France). Regardless of the stated mission of the assembled reporters, there is always an underlying subconscious searching for any suspicions which could break the story on the next doper in the ranks.
Just looking at the period from Lance Armstrong's retirement after the 2005 Tour de France and his return to the sport last September, fans in America who might've otherwise paid no attention to cycling were given reasons to rejoice and then felt the sting of having the rug pulled from underfoot. The 2006 Tour de France featured a wide-open field. Before the Tour could even start, the lid was blown off Operacion Puerto, an investigation by the Spanish Guardia Civil which blew the lid off a comprehensive doping ring being operated by Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes in Madrid. Over sixty of the purported two-hundred-plus athletes working with Fuentes were cyclists. Among their ranks were Jan Ullrich, the German winner of the 1997 Tour who looked poised to be the one to crack five victories until Armstrong returned on the scene after recovering from his bout with testicular cancer; Ivan Basso, the man who won the 2006 Giro d'Italia but was forced to forgo the Tour despite being viewed as the heir apparent to the Armstrong legacy; and a majority of the riders for Manolo Saiz's Liberty Seguros squad, whose title sponsor - the Spanish division of American insurance giant - soon pulled its investment.
But the ejection of the implicated riders did not end the suspicions. In the end, one of the most exciting Tours in recent history was waged on the road, with American leader Floyd Landis of Phonak defeating Spanish rider Oscar Pereiro, who had taken over leadership of the Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears team after pre-race favorite Alejandro Valverde was forced to abandon with an injury. Floyd would get the better of Oscar in a feel-good story for American fans who were in danger of souring to the sport once Lance left the scene. But the former Menonite boy from Pennsylvania conquered all other contenders to take the crown in Paris. The victory wouldn't last long, as the presence of exogenous testosterone was detected in both his A-sample and B-sample provided following his improbable Alpine solo victory that marked his comeback to overtake Pereiro after a bad day the previous stage in the mountains.
The voctory, thus was hollow for Pereiro, who knew not only that he had been cheated on the road but also that the absence of the riders from the start had watered down the field. Not just those who had been implicated, either, were affected. For instance the suspensions stemming from Puerto forced, through seemingly no fault of his own, Liberty Seguros' Kazakh leader, Alexandre Vinokourov, to miss the race when fewer than the minimum riders on the start list were able to actually start the first stage. With the team's sponsor gone, Vinokourov was forced to go hunting for a new sponsor for his squad. Returning to his homeland, Vinokourov brought together a consortium of Kazakh corporations and the national government to sponsor the squad under the name of the nation's capital, Astana. The team lined up at the 2007 Tour poised to make up for lost time and prove their worthiness in the pro peloton. But Vinokourov was soon turning up a positive test himself, getting booted from the Tour... and this time he could blame nobody but himself.
Neither could Michael Rasmussen lay blame at any feet but his own after his Rabobank team made the unilateral decision to voluntarily remove the Danish rider from the race while in the yellow jersey. Never before had such a move been taken by a team, but the Dutch squad felt the need to maintain its public image after it was discovered that Rasmussen had evaded pre-Tour out-of-competition doping controls. All in all the race marked just another chapter in the long history of doping scandals at the Tour and throughout the greater sport of cycling.
2008 didn't work any differently. A new generation of endurance-enhancing drugs appeared for the first time on the scene, with third-iteration recombitant erythropoietin drug CERA turning up in samples of several riders, including former Armstrong lieutenant Manuel "Triki" Beltran and then-leader of both the polka-dot King of the Mountains and white young rider's jerseys Riccardo Ricco. After the race third-place finisher in Paris, Bernhard Kohl of Austria, would also turn out to have used CERA to aid his performance.
So if another positive turns up in 2009, it really won't be that shocking. Remember, the top cyclists are tested dozens of times throughout the entire year, both in and out of competition. If you test enough times, something is bound to turn up eventually. As Cadel Evans, runner-up in each of the past two Tours de France, said in rebuttal to the reports such as the one provided by Keaten in the opening quote, "... the sport is being cleaned up in a serious, fair and transparent way. Our sport is being crucified for doing the right thing."
While we've seen more than our fair share of doping positives coming out of cycling in the past two decades and beyond, that is due as much to the fact that the sport had a codified process for testing its athletes long before American sports leagues dreamed of such a policy. And ultimately we've witnessed so many athletes over the decades and throughout the past century who have turned to the best chemistry of the time to boost their performance that it seems damn near an integral part of human nature that we seek the best gains possible by any means necessary to improve our performance. So it has gone in the past, so too will it go in the future... and all the tests in the world will not discourage those who, like the CERA cases of last year's Tour, think they have the system beat.