95th Tour de France

Stage 7 - Brioude to Aurillac - 159.0 km (98.5 mi)

11 July 2008

Two Spanish climbers of two different generations underscored the doping gap still all too apparent in the professional peloton. While 24-year-old Luis Leon Sanchez, a rider on Alejandro Valverde's Caisse d'Epargne team, was battling a select group to solo in to the finish in Aurillac, results were coming back on testing performed on Tour veteran Manuel Beltran. Beltran, a 37-year-old rider who helped Lance Armstrong in three of his Tour victories, is the fourth rider from Armstrong's past teams to test positive for one or another forms of doping. There are two vastly different mindsets to what has occurred here: one type of fan asserts that the Tour is nothing but a sham; however, I feel that this most recent positive result is yet another indicator that the testing is real and is doing its job.

One might say that it distracts from the racing, and indeed it does. But the fact remains that cycling tests its athletes more than any other sport worldwide, and for more compounds than the American sports fan could even imagine. Beltran tested positive for erythropoietin, a red-blood-cell-producer which, in synthetic form, is often given to cancer patients after chemotherapy. The benefits gained from EPO for cyclists and other endurance athletes comes in the fact that the body, with more red blood cells, can carry more oxygen throughout the body, allowing it to perform more efficiently. Could this potentially help someone in, say, basketball? Certainly... but there's no test for it. While it might not be the right drug for baseball or football, which require more short bursts of energy than sustained production... yet an athlete, in his quest for glory, could easily attempt to use it to gain an advantage in either of these sports. After all, people long thought it insane that steroids could possibly do anything for a baseball player. Yet there is no proactive testing on the part of either leagues or teams in the United States.

Cycling is taking that proactive step. Teams like Garmin-Chipotle, Columbia, CSC and Astana are at the forefront of internal testing controls to supplement those in- and out-of-competition tests conducted at races through the auspices of national agencies and the World Anti-Doping Agency. Now the UCI has even implemented a biological passport in which different key blood and chemical markers are taken repeatedly over time, allowing

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