Epic flick with dopey subtext

22 July 2014 - 02:01 By Ross Tucker
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Doctor Know: Ross Tucker
Doctor Know: Ross Tucker
Image: Times Media Group

The surviving riders enjoy their second rest day of the Tour de France today, followed by a final week that culminates in the traditional finish on the Champs-Élysées next Sunday.

The 2014 Tour has reminded us that thinking too far ahead is perilous, and so victory for Vincenzo Nibali of Italy is anything but guaranteed - despite his commanding lead.

However, the Italian has been imperious, barely seeming to breathe as he has dominated every single rider once the road has climbed heavenwards.

The race was expected to be a duel between defending champion Chris Froome and Alberto Contador, with Nibali many people's third favourite after a relatively disappointing performance in the biggest lead-up event, the Dauphiné Libéré.

By day five, Froome was gone, a broken wrist and hand ending his campaign. By day 10 , Contador had joined him, courtesy of a high-speed crash and a broken tibia.

That left Nibali, who showed enormous improvements since the Dauphine, to assume a dominance of the Tour not seen in recent years.

And, in cycling, dominance is equated with doping, such is the history of the sport.

The race leader's yellow jersey is a spotlight for doping questions, and in 2012 and 2013 that spotlight belonged to riders from Britain's Sky team.

It revealed tremendous animosity and hostility towards doping sceptics.

Bradley Wiggins, the 2012 champion, publicly called those questioning his performance "bone idle wa#@ers", while in 2013 Sky director Sir David Brailsford labelled the sceptics "pseudoscientists".

Such defensiveness, while understandable if riders are clean, also points to selective amnesia, given that it was only a decade earlier that the identical playbook was used by Lance Armstrong and the US-based media to deflect criticism of his US Postal team and his own performances.

Hindsight, it seems, is 20:20 only when patriotic blindfolds are not worn.

Even David Walsh, the British journalist who had so determinedly and justifiably pursued Armstrong, changed his approach.

Having previously argued that the speeds with which the dopers rode up steep mountain climbs were suspicious (Armstrong, Contador and Denmark's Michael Rasmussen were particular targets), he now dismisses the idea that you can suspect riders of doping because of "unrealistic performances".

This is but one of many examples of how a standard that was applied to one group or person has not been applied consistently to others, and it is this hypocrisy that undermines the promises of change made by the sport.

For example, while Armstrong and his former manager Johan Bruyneel serve life and 10-year bans for doping respectively, other former riders, like Bjarne Riis and Alexandre Vinokourov, who were just as guilty of doping, are currently managing the best teams in the pro-peloton.

Some dopers have been unrepentant and welcomed back, while others have confessed and then been ostracised.

Doctors and trainers implicated by dozens of testimonies as managing doping programmes continue to work with the best riders.

Banned drugs are prescribed and allowed for medical reasons, despite being borderline unethical, suggesting that all teams play the same game, pushing the limits of legality.

Even the management of doping by the sport's governing body sows doubt - some riders have all their results stripped after doping, others only selected results.

Amid allegations that riders like Armstrong received preferential treatment (to the point of tip-offs and cover-ups), the sport simply cannot afford to blunder through another opaque, murky era of doping management.

Yet it does so, but still asks for confidence.

This is the reason, aside from the performances and the dominance of selected riders, that people remain sceptical, even cynical.

None of this is to say that the presence of former dopers in the sport automatically guarantees that doping persists - people can (and do) repent and change.

However, as much as we want to believe in the riders and the sport, there is an uncomfortable feeling that we're just watching another episode of the same series.

After all, it's the same cast in the same influential roles.

Why should this episode end differently?

It's time for a new movie.

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