Disaster for Le Tour

Ullrich and others are out and many more could follow

Disaster for this years tour and loud echoes of 98.

Links to several reports in this thread...

http://www.cyclingplus.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=100902&whichpage=1

 

But there is no hint of this on the Reuters webpage ???

 

There is this too:

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2006/jun06/jun30news3

And French sports paper L'Equipe writes today that a bag of used syringes was found the day before Paris-Roubaix back in April, allegedly dumped by several people in a car marked after one of the CSC team's sponsors. The syringes had been throroughly cleaned, but investigators have found traces of an unkown molecule, which could be of the "designer steroid" family (like THG).

 

Put me back on my bike...

 

The favourite Basso is out too leaving the podium wide open. This is turning out to be the biggest scandal in pro cycling since 98. What a dark day it is.

Hopefully Millar can bring a smile to our faces and win the prologue tomorrow. Of course...it would be ironic as he's just returned from a drugs ban himself.

 

IMO the biggest scandal is yet to come. Someone stole 7 wins in a row and walked scot free, while at the same time turning the tour in a very dull event.

With some of the favorites out now, the door is wide open to the Americans, among whom 3 serious contenders are with Discovery Channel. Rings a bell.

 

So what are to read into this, no one wants to participate if they can't take drugs? What a sport!

 

I suppose that was a rhetorical question, but I'll answer. No, that's not what to read into it. Rather, the rewards of competing at the top level are so high in any popular sport that it is hard for any sportsperson (thinking of the future, home, kids' education, etc.) to resist anything that gives an edge, whether it is altitude training, a psychologist, blood storage, or drugs.

I'm sure nearly every person taken individually would not take drugs given the certainty that others will not take them. But they never have that certainty, so it's human to reason that it is unfair on oneself, family, etc. not to compete on level footing.

Plus of course there may be some greedy cheats, like any other walk of life, but not all of them. Most are stuck in a kind of tragedy. There are parallels with overfishing and the problem of "tragedy of the commons"; every individual would rather not do it, but not doing it would create a disadvantage for that individual relative to the others, in the absence of a very good framework for preventing the others behaving in the undesirable way.