Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

More about doping and pro cycling...isn't that why you read this blog?

So, former Tour de France winner (1996) and current CSC team manager/owner/sporting director Bjarne Riis was recently accused by a former teammate (from the time when he rode for the T-Mobile team with Jan Ullrich) of using performance enhancing substances during his years as a rider. When Riis was asked about the accusations he didn't deny them but instead told folks to stop digging around in the past. In some quarters he has been pilloried for this stance but I have to stand up and say "Bravo". After my last post about Jan fessing up, why would I do this?

You have to understand that when Riis won the Tour in '96 the use of EPO was beginning to run rampant (the same is true for Ullrich when he won the '97 Tour). Only two years later the Tour would be rocked by what was then the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports when the Festina team was found to be carrying EPO in the team car. It seems pretty clear to me that just about everyone was doping. Several ex-cyclists have written or spoken about the atmosphere at the time that held that if a cyclist were truly professional they were expected to dope as a matter of course. Riis (and Ullrich I believe) were products of this culture and they acted accordingly. There are reports that Miguel Indurian quit the sport after a famous falling out with his team director because he refused to take EPO after losing the '96 Tour to Riis. Big Mig, it was whispered, was not "professional".

After Riis retired at the end of the '97 season he spent a couple years out of the sport and then returned in 2000 as the sporting director of a new team. His goal was to do things differently and he signed the American company, CSC, as the title sponsor and enticed French cycling icon Laurent Jalabert to join the team. Jaja had just left the ONCE team (which would become Liberty Siguros) because of a falling out with his sporting director Manolo Saiz (who was later caught red-handed by the Operation Puetro investigators holding bags of blood attributed to several of his riders). One might speculate that this falling out had to do with Jaja's level of "professionalism".

Riis, I think wanted to build a team atmosphere that was free of performance enhancers and built on trust betweent he riders and the directors (which is why Jaja ended up riding for him). Actually, I think he has done exactly that. CSC has been among the best teams in the world and from all indications, it's riders have ridden clean. The one exception may have been Tyler Hamilton and he left the team in a really unexpected move that may have had a lot to do with Riis' insistence that he work only with team doctors rather than a doctor in Spain that seemed a little shady.

So what I think Riis is saying is, "Yeah, I doped. Things were different then and not in a good way. Right now I'm working hard to change things and move our sport out of a culture where doping is encouraged and/or required. I'd much rather talk about the best way to do that than to discuss what's in the past that can't be changed." Truth be told, I think Riis is a great guy to do that. He's seen the underbelly of the sport. I'll bet that when he looks at his yellow jerseys he feels a sense of regret that he didn't win them clean. I'll bet he would like the riders under his supervision to avoid the dilemma that he faced and the compromises he ended up making. He's implimented some of the best anti-doping practices for his team and has been one of the strongest advocates of a DNA testing procedure to determine a rider's innocence or guilt when the time to prove that comes.

Sometimes it takes a person who has been downt he wrong rode to understand what it takes to keep from going there. I sincerely hope that's the case with Bjarne.

As always, thanks for reading.

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