Dopes on Wheels

It is amazing how Belgium loves shooting itself in the foot over cycling. While every Frenchman is smiling over the Floyd Landis situation and still wishing they could have nailed Armstrong in time, the sports news in this country is flooded with cyclists who bent or broke the rules late in their careers (Johan Museeuw), team bosses who "forced" their members to shoot-up (Patrick Lefevre) and team doctors who were "there but did not participate" (Yvan Vanmol).

The unfortunate thing about all of this is that there is so much good news for Belgians to be found in cycling today. The World Championship in "Field Cycling" was won by a dark horse Belgian (Erwin Vervecken) who beat the favoured Belgians (Sven Nys & Bart Wellens) and Tom Boonen has continued his winning ways in Qatar having won the last two stages at the writing of this post.

Yet here we are, with Jean-Marie Dedecker throwing all the latest dirt and even top riders such as Boonen finding themselves on the defensiven while a lawsuit brought by Lefevre against Dedecker for defamation enters the courts.

Why has cycling become the poster-child for performance enhancers? What is it about this sport that brings out the worst in our athletes, or is it just a witch-hunt making a lot of innocents look bad?

An article on about.com touches on the reasons cyclers are motivated to use performance enhancing drugs and, particularly, EPO. The distances of major races means any ability to increase the oxygen in the blood gives a certain advantage. This is the primary benefit of EPO.

There might be some out there who say we shouldn't care less who cheats. If they want to open their bodies to the 70 or so possible side-effects of drug use just to have more chance of winning, who are we to stop them? The problem with this attitude is that it unfairly tilts the balance in sports making it increasingly difficult for those who don't cheat to have any chance of winning, motivating them to consider cheating to have a chance and continue and increase a vicious cycle that will result in a lot of top athletes with messed-up futures.

Totalbike.com ran an interesting, albeit encyclopedia-style post about the history of doping in sports. It is hardly a new problem and will not go away quickly, but I'm starting to think the news about it has more place among stories of frauds and thieves than in the sports section.

It was like the week I looked at the college sports page on Yahoo! and there were 6 stories of athletes in trouble with the law or for breaking NCAA rules than there were actual sports stories. It is time to rededicate the sports pages to honest athletes and put the criminals in the columns where they belong.