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Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay



In the Company of Athletes, Cheaters, and Monastics

Essay Posted July 31, 2007 by James E. Nelson

As I reported a few weeks ago, most of the best known cyclists didn’t ride in this year’s Tour de France because they had been charged, accused, or implicated in illegal blood doping scandals. During the race three more riders (including Alexander Vinokourov, the pre-race favorite) were kicked out of the race for doping, and two teams withdrew as a result.

A week into the race, it was announced that Michael Rasmussen (the race leader at the time) had been kicked off the Danish National Cycling team (the National Olympic team), because he had missed two scheduled blood tests. During the next week it came out that he had been lying about his whereabouts during these two absences. Rather than staying in Mexico (where is wife is from) as he had claimed, he had been training in secret in the Dolomites (a mountain range in Italy). Most of the major European cycling doping scandals centered around medical doctors who lived in this part of Italy. It looked very suspicious given the fact that he was lying about where he had been.

Rasmussen’s performance had been nothing short of miraculous throughout the first half of the tour. The circumstantial evidence that something was amiss was becoming overwhelming. All along the race route people were booing him. At the beginning of the last mountain stage all the riders, except for Rasmussen’s Rabbobank team, stayed at the starting line for a minute after the start of the race in protest of Rasmussen. He was being tested every day and no signs of doping ever showed up. But the weight of circumstantial evidence was finally so overwhelming that Rabbobank kicked him off their team and he was stripped of the Yellow Jersey.

Bob Roll, cycling commentator, called the one-two punch of Vinokourov and Rasmussen “Professional Cycling’s darkest hour.” Phil Liggett, former cycler who has been commentating the sport for over thirty years, disagreed. He called it cycling’s finest hour, because in this Tour they were finally making the hard decisions and doing the right thing in spite of the economic consequences.

And indeed, this year’s Tour may mark a turning point in the sport. (Although only time will tell.) Many of the old guard have either retired or been forced out of the sport in shame. The new champions, in turn, are all very young.

It is generally agreed that cyclists don’t mature until they are about 30 years old. There’s even a special category for best young cyclist for those aged 26 or younger. Younger bodies simply don’t have the stamina to maintain the output necessary for a three week tour. But at the end of the race, 27 year old Tom Boonen was the oldest person to win a jersey, having won the Green Jersey for the sprint competition. Alberto Contador, the race winner, is only 24. Juan Mauricio Soler Hernandez, who won the climbing competition, is also 24. Furthermore, these younger riders are famously clean and vociferously opposed to doping.

It would appear that we have entered a new era in professional cycling in which attitudes about drugs are quite different than they used to be. This sensibility against doping is new to the sport. Prior to 1967 the wide use of drug cocktails was well known and tolerated by professional cycling. It was simply part of the sport. But British cyclist Tom Simpson died on the course during the 1967 Tour de France. He had been taking amphetamines as a stimulant, Palfium to kill the pain in his legs and then sleeping pills at night to counteract the amphetamines (source: Mitch Mueller). The day he died he was also a bit drunk. The official cause of death was heat stroke, but there was no question that the underlying cause was the drugs.

But that was a different era for cycling. Each stage was unbelievably long. It was not uncommon for riders to be in the saddle 15 to 17 hours a day. It was not humanly possible to do that without the magic of pharmacology. In a famous 1924 interview given to French reporter Albert Londres, Henri Pélissier said, when asked how they could ride for so many hours a day, “We run on dynamite.”

But the death of Tom Simpson (the Lance Armstrong of his day), caused the world to gasp in horror at what they had winked at previously. Steps began to be taken. Over the next four decades attitudes have changed dramatically. Drug use was viewed as an acceptable part of the sport, but something that polite company didn’t talk about. Today it’s viewed as the lowest form of cheating. In turn, each stage has been shortened dramatically so that it is possible to ride major tours without drugs.

Armstrong himself probably had a lot to do with the current change in sensibilties. He was frequently accused of taking drugs (mostly by French authorities who were famously jealous of that American's success in a French race), but was in fact horrified by the thought of drugs (according to his friends). He had incredible stamina because he was a freak of nature. His heart is half again as big as the typical athlete's heart. It pumps an amazing amount of blood every minute.

Every generation seems to havee a rider who is uniquely endowed with a perfect physiology for the sport. Prior to Armstrong it was Miguel Indurain, who held the record for the most Tour de France wins until Armstrong surpassed him in 2005. In the early 1960s it was Jacques Anquetil, possibly the best time trialer the sport has ever had. People like Anquetil, Indourain, and Armstrong (who were all physiologically different than nearly every other human) were the reason that the Tom Simpsons, Jan Ullrichs, and Alexander Vinokourovs had to cheat. Without the use of drugs (or somebody else’s blood) it simply wasn’t a level playing field.

Anquetil was probably an alcoholic. He drank regularly on le Tour and still won. Indourain was more spartan than that, but was still tolerant of the drug culture in cycling. But Armstrong had the reputation of being somewhat puritanical about athletes putting substances in their body. It probably had something to do with his cancer. It also had a lot to do with the culture of American road cycling which was centered in Boulder, Colorado, home of Celestial Seasonings, Buddhist Vegans, and all sorts of natural foods ideas. (Yes, I know Armstrong’s a Texan and did much of his training in Austin, but during the 70s and 80s Boulder was the epicenter of American road racing.)

(I will also observe that Floyd Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour who was accused of doping and stripped of the Yellow Jersey, didn’t come out of that culture. He was a mountain biker before becoming a road racer in 1999. Mountain bikers, along with their other “extreme sports” colleagues have quite a reputation for taking advantage of the joys of creative pharmacology. Whether Landis cheated remains an open question. The evidence is mixed and a bit flimsy. But his history as a mountain biker has not, like, helped his cause, dude!)

For the first 75 years of the sport, professional cycling was just a bunch of boys behaving badly while riding around Europe. The scandal of it all was as much a part of the fun as who got across the finish line first. But Armstrong brought a very different sort of seriousness to the sport. It’s not that previous generations of riders weren’t serious, it’s rather that Armstrong was rather monkish about it. On the last day of this years le Tour, he was in the broadcast booth with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. They asked him if he missed it. His answer was that he didn’t miss the training and hard work, but he did miss the simplicity of being on the road. There is a purity to the lifestyle, he said. “You eat, sleep, ride a bike occasionally . . .” Life is stripped down to its essentials and you learn to do the essentials well. “When you’re on the tour you don’t have to deal with any distractions like sponsors. It’s purity and focus. It’s like being in a monastery”

I suspect it never once occurred to Jacques Anquetil to make that comparison.

But Armstrong is more correct than he knows, when he compares his own discipline to that of the monks. The monks are quite precisely “spiritual athletes” (for that is the translation of the term ascesis from which we get our word “ascetic”). They strip their lives bare of anything nonessential and then work very hard at the few things that remain. Like Armstrong on a bicycle, there is a purity and focus to the lifestyle.

And with that sort of purity of focus coupled with the amazing popularity of Lance Armstrong both in the U.S. and Europe, there was simply no room for bad boys riding bikes around Europe anymore. For instance, when race winner Alberto Contador slipped back to the team car, about half way through the last stage, to get his first glass of champaign from Lance Armstrong, who was pouring the bubbly from the car window (drinking champaign on the final stage is a long and hallowed tradition, after all), the scene suddenly switched to a picture of an historic church building the pelaton was passing by. Evidently the image of champaign in the hand of the Yellow Jersey holder was not considered fit for television.

And in a way, that is too bad. When sport ceases to be play, something is lost. Of course something else that’s a bit immeasurable is gained—Lance Armstrong was utterly awe-inspiring to watch, whether climbing a mountain or riding a time trial—but much of the fun seems to be gone with this new purity of focus.

It’s not unlike what has happened to NASCAR. It is a sport born of bootlegging and running from the Revenuers. Those early NASCAR drivers were bad boys, no matter how you cut the mustard. And because of its roots, cheating was simply a part of NASCAR. Figuring out how to do something illegal that gave you an edge on the track was a fundamental part of the purity and focus of the sport. (If I may be allowed to turn Lance Armstrong’s turn of phrase on its head.)

Until the “Car of Tomorrow.”

The “Car of Tomorrow,” the new generation car which has been used at about half of this year’s races, was advertised as a great technological breakthrough. According to its promoters, it takes NASCAR to the next level of cutting-edge development. In fact, the new car was all about preventing cheating. All the technical breakthroughs have to do with making it nearly impossible for the teams to cheat and not get caught.

As Hendrick Motor Sports discovered a few weeks ago.

Both Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon faced big fines and the loss of their crew chiefs for a few weeks because the crews were “tinkering” with the cars above and beyond the call of duty. Both Johnson and Gordon drive for Hendrick Motor Sports, so you know it was no fluke, since two cars from the same company got nailed. Hendrick thought they had found a way around the rules and got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Of course if the Revenuers (or whatever you call those people who make the rules for NASCAR) catch a team cheating, they have to do something, but the severity of Hendrick’s punishment was quite shocking. Lowering the boom on Hendrick was an attempt to send a message to the rest of NASCAR that cheating will no longer be tolerated.

And it’s kind of sad. NASCAR without cheating would be like cherry pie without an occasional pit, pork and beans without that 1centimeter cube of pork fat laying on the top of the can, and hot dogs without the occasional rat hair and bug part. It just wouldn’t be American! As NASCAR becomes both more technical and technological, it becomes more like Formula 1, and the fun of boys behaving badly while running their stock cars around the beach at Daytona simply disappears.

All for the purity of focus on fair competition.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for purity of focus when it comes to monks on Mt. Athos and Zen masters in Boulder. I’m even for purity of focus when the optometrist is getting the prescription on my glasses just right.

But whether in bicycling or NASCAR, the new purity of focus changes the equation. The sport of these sporting events of old was as much in the scandal as in the glory of the finish line. Somehow I suspect we’ve lost a lot with this purity of focus that too often is transformed into a new puritanism.