This cheat means Britain’s great cycling boom feels rotten
THE Gordian knot was the hardest to untie, according to legend. Alexander the Great sliced through it with his sword. There is no such easy solution for cycling and Lance Armstrong.
He cannot simply be excised from the record books, without leaving page after page empty having taken a raft of contemporaries with him. Last week, Christian Prudhomme, head of ASo, the Tour de France organiser, proposed rewriting history to have no winner of the race from 1999 to 2005. Why not just erase Armstrong and promote the next best, some say. Impossible.
If Armstrong goes, all cheats must follow, and for the Tour to remove every name associated with doping would make it seem ridiculous and damage its credibility for ever.
For British cycling, the timing of this crisis could not be worse. At the very time when the sport is at last making its great leap forward, 1,000 pages of the most damning criticism land on the doorstep.
A lot of rival sports have dreamed of such progression. Cricket has been vulnerable as the primary summer sport for some time. Parts of the island do not play it, participation is time consuming and costly, land is at a premium. Football has the winter tied up, we know that. England were rugby union world champions in 2003, but nobody seriously believed inroads could be made on football’s territory.
With cricket, it is different. England rose to be the No 1 Test team in the world but it had little impact on the grass roots. Cricket is dying in state schools, the county game is dwindling in significance. Football has been steadily encroaching on the summer, too.
Then came Bradley Wiggins in the Tour de France and Great Britain’s magnificent performance in the Velodrome at a home olympics. Suddenly, we were a nation of cyclists. Every kid has a bike and road to ride it on, and in Wiggins the sport has a bona
fide, David Beckham-style hero. He has the talent, he has the look. He captures young imaginations. Look around, there are more cyclists on the road than ever before. Not just commuters in cities, either. There are races, there are clubs, there are grown men pedalling while wearing Team Sky kit, as they might the shirt of Manchester United.
And now this. Page after page of cheats, cheats, cheats. No wonder Wiggins is furious that his first task as cycling’s unofficial ambassador in Britain is to try to convince the parents of the next generation that his sport will not turn their children into EPo-fuelled monsters.
Trying to unpick Armstrong and his era from cycling is akin to unknotting that tangled ball of old computer leads, mobile - phone chargers and television cables that lurks in a dark corner of a kitchen drawer, except one hundred times worse.
For instance, reassessing two of Armstrong’s victories, 2000 and 2002, and removing every rider who has been caught doping or been significantly implicated in a scandal — one must remember here that many known cheats have not failed a test, including Armstrong — would mean promoting two 10th- placed athletes to first: Daniele Nardello in 2000 and Carlos Sastre in 2002.
The clean winners of the Tour de France in the Armstrong years would be: Abraham olano (1999, sixth), Nardello (2000, 10th), Andrei Kivilev (2001, fourth), Sastre (2002, 10th), Haimar Zubeldia (2003, fifth), Sastre (2004, eighth) and Cadel Evans (2005, seventh). Throughout those years only two untainted athletes made the top five.
It cuts deeper. L’Alpe d’Huez is arguably the most famous mountain climb in the Tour de France. It is an average 7.9 per cent gradient with 21 hairpin bends. In 1986, the great French rider Bernard Hinault — ‘ as long as I breathe, I attack’ — rode the ascent in 48 minutes. His now stands as the 36th fastest time. The record is held by the late Marco Pantani from 1997: it is 10 minutes and 25 seconds faster.
Sometimes, the numbers simply do not add up. There was huge controversy over Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen at the London olympics, and many thought it unfair that she was immediately suspected, without evidence.
Yet it wasn’t just laymen or journalists questioning Ye. Respected coaches, looking at the figures in detail, were first to raise the alarm.
So, analysing Pantani, even allowing for improvements in equipment and training techniques, to take 10 minutes off a 48-minute event is close to impossible. Some of L’Alpe d’Huez’s fastest times have been set as part of a time trial, when the athlete hasn’t already cycled 100 miles to get there. To shave three minutes off Hinault in those circumstances might be explicable. But 10? No way. And cycling, in the years cited by Prudhomme, is full of these freaks’ roll calls.
To erase Armstrong, the sport would as good as erase itself for a decade or more. The year before Armstrong’s 1999 win, the top 10 in the Tour included three riders who tested positive (including the first and second finishers) and another imprisoned for violating anti- doping laws. of the six remaining, two more have been implicated in scandals. The two successive winners after Armstrong’s last victory in 2005, Floyd Landis and Alberto Contador, were subsequently disqualified.
THE problem for cycling in Britain is that its status as a profile sport first began to take shape through Armstrong. From there, home- grown heroes such as Wiggins, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton took cycling to a place in public life that previous generations could never have imagined.
So, with the condemnation of Armstrong, it is the very foundation of the British cycling boom that appears to be rotten. Unlike the French or Belgians, we have no prior history or culture to cling to, no glorious golden era free of EPo and clandestine blood transfusions.
Instead of promoting a sport full of fresh air and fitness, Wiggins and his colleagues are now on the defensive. It is hardly a surprise that he has been known to snap at questions about doping. It is the last topic that should be regularly tossed at him as a clean rider, the last conversation his sport needs to be having right now; yet if cycling is to fulfil its potential it must first find a way of removing its links to Armstrong on page after page.
It will take a lot more than Tipp-Ex, or a visit to the printers.