Fighting through a downward cycle
Tour de France spinning its wheels trying to recover from the sport's drug scandal
LONDON -- Cycling, having lived through a prolonged drug binge, is now trying to purge, leaving fans and riders to wonder whether the sport is making progress on getting doping out of its system.
It's only natural that cycling's premier event would be viewed as a litmus test of where things stand, and right now they are murky.
The Tour de France begins outside of its ancestral home tomorrow with a situation unique in its 104-year history -- no name in the defending champion's slot. Floyd Landis, the 2006 winner who tested positive for synthetic testosterone, is awaiting an arbitrator's ruling in his case. His name has been removed from the yellow band at the top of the page in the statistical guide detailing last year's events, and a straightforward editor's note tells why:
"At press time, the responsible authorities have not yet ruled on the case of Floyd Landis, who tested positive the evening of Stage 17. In the event that he is convicted of doping, he will be taken out of the standings."
That pending historical revision is bookended by the page 10 years before, where 1996 Tour winner Bjarne Riis's name has been similarly excised, with a note attributing the change to his recent confession that he doped for a lengthy stretch of his career, including the summer he wore the overall leader's yellow jersey at the end of the final stage in Paris.
The sport is trying to look ahead but keeps glancing in its rearview mirror, adjusting its past. In another symbolic gesture, the 21-team, 189-man peloton will embark on its three-week, 2,217-mile odyssey without a rider wearing No. 1 attached to the back of his jersey.
On the other hand, in a distinctly nonsymbolic move, every rider who will roll down the start ramp for tomorrow's prologue time trial here was compelled to sign a document saying he would abide by anti-doping regulations, surrender a DNA sample on demand, and hand over a year's salary if he is caught cheating.
Yet even if this year's edition of the Tour is overtly scandal-free, as its organizers and participants so fervently hope, cycling's most daunting problem is less visible. After years of damaging revelations, fans and riders have no firm reference points to judge which performances are legitimate and which are propelled by performance-enhancing drugs.
Bradley Wiggins, a lanky, articulate British cyclist with a Rod Stewart-vintage shag haircut, is one of the candidates to win tomorrow's stage. He said at a press conference yesterday that riders often feel no more confident about picking their way through the thicket of suspicion than spectators do.
"The scrutiny has always been there," said Wiggins, an Olympic gold medalist in 2004 who converted to road racing. "Every race you go to, whoever wins is the talk of the [team] dinner table. Whatever you achieve in cycling, people doubt you."
Even a favorite son like Wiggins can't escape the derisive treatment accorded the sport in many quarters. He said he and his Cofidis teammates had to endure a fair amount of verbal abuse during a recent training session outside London.
"God knows how many white van [delivery] men shouted at us, 'You're dopers, we don't want the Tour here,' " Wiggins said.
"It was quite bad, actually.
"But for me, it's a case of being honest and open about what I believe in. I know I'm clean and I'm proud of it. If I win that way, it'll be fantastic. If that's not good enough, it's not good enough."
If this is not the Tour of Credibility, it's at the very least a Tour of Transition that will unfold in an increasingly tenuous economic environment for the sport.
Television ratings in Europe, where cycling's fan base is overwhelmingly concentrated, are down, and several corporate sponsors have elected to back away from the sport. Discovery Channel, the team once led and still partially owned by seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, is still searching for financial backing for next year.
Since last year's debacle, when several prominent riders were forced off the start line because they were implicated in the Operacion Puerto doping investigation in Spain, and Landis's positive test was leaked a few days after he rolled triumphantly down the Champs-Elysees, there has been a dizzying mix of encouraging signs and setbacks.
Interestingly, one company sticking with the sport is CSC, the information technology giant based outside Los Angeles, which not only bankrolls Riis's team but is also a sponsor of the race.
Yesterday, Guy Hains, CSC's European group president, spoke at an event for 3,000 employees at the company's continental headquarters south of London and addressed reporters who wanted to know why he hasn't bailed out, given cycling's troubled image.
"It's true that we've had cause to reflect in the last few months," Hains said. But he said he and other top executives still consider the team -- which has been one of the circuit's most successful in recent years -- a valuable motivational tool for CSC's workforce.
CSC is one of several teams that have implemented internal testing programs overseen by outside entities. The testing is meant to complement what is done by cycling's governing body, the UCI, and establish long-term physiological profiles for riders so that irregular results can be spotted even before they cross the threshold of a positive test.
"We want to set a standard that pulls the whole sport up," Hains said.
A number of former and current riders has given up the pretense of lying and shed light on cycling's doping culture -- sometimes sensationally -- in media reports. Their confessions, while sometimes self-serving and made for profit, are contributing to a changed environment in which authorities are intent on prosecuting riders whether or not they have actual positive test results.
Jan Ullrich, the German icon and T-Mobile team leader who finished second to Riis in 1996 and won the race in 1997, retired after his DNA sample showed he had banked blood for doping purposes at the Madrid clinic that was the focus of the Operacion Puerto probe.
Ivan Basso, the Italian rider who was suspended and then fired by CSC last year, denied links to Puerto and was cleared for a time by his country's cycling authorities. He was signed, controversially, by Discovery, but in May admitted he, too, was a client of the Madrid clinic and is out of competition until late next year.
No one in the sport is saying that all the bad apples have been tossed, and the reality of the 2007 Tour is that some of its most prominent figures are still in some way defined by doping. Christophe Moreau, the 36-year-old dean of French riders who is somewhat unexpectedly among the favorites in this race, was one of the Festina riders who confessed and was punished several years ago.
Moreau is trying to become the first Frenchman to win the country's signature event since Bernard Hinault in 1985. "We're still in a difficult atmosphere that weighs on all of us," Moreau said. "We're all trying to make the maximum effort to show we're moving forward."
The director of Moreau's AG2R team, Vincent Lavenu, was a little more tempered in his comments. "Cycling is in the process of changing, and the fight is not just a stop sign you put up," he said. "It's a process. We're not at the end of the path." 