Interesting • drugs and PDM •

[bikeworkshop]

It's sad that the riders got all the flak for taking drugs, when surely it was the race organisers' responsibility to keep it clean.

By the 90s, I think we can assume that if you weren't doping, you'd be unlikely to be fast enough to be in the team.

The clean riders couldn't get a look in.

Remember the Virenque sit-in 1998?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_affair

They were objecting to the situation where you had to take drugs to be fast enough and have the stamina, but then had to get woken up in the night by the police searching for the drugs you must have taken.

 

[Rapparee87]

This is why I like the 'olden days' when guys like Fausto Coppi were a thing. Remove the monetary incentive, and people will stop cheating.

There's an infamous appearance on an Italian TV show from the 1950s, where Coppi and Bartali were singing a song joking about the drugs they had taken. Doping wasn't thought of as much of a crime then though. Just par for the course.

 

[bikeworkshop]

I think there's a connection between the early deaths of racing cyclists and official attempts at drug control.

 

[Rapparee87]

It brings Boardman's Tour prologue wins in the 90s into perspective though. Everyone behind him either later confessed or were later caught for EPO

 

[bikeworkshop]

"You cannot compete in the Tour de France on mineral water alone."

– Jacques Anquetil
Tour winner 1957, 61-64

 

[Woz]

As above. He said it early.

I would like to think the sport is cleaned up - sufficiently enough - at least professionally these days.

The old epoch (read 50s - 70s) is sort of an open shut case. Remember there was a death with certain Tommy Simpson which highlighted what the sport and the conflict of personal drive was about and that provided at least a pause to think. The 80s - 90s something had to be done, totally out of hand. 90s onwards a well deserved crack down - and no longer in the "internal sport governing bodies" but with competent (national) authorities that can exercise a legal right. A needed overdue wake up call in my books. No one is above law.

Personally, I think the likes of Pantini says (on record, post career and post death research) more about it than the first level vicious control freak dick wipe Armstrong. To be a winner demands something special, to be a constant winner over a long successive period is automatically suspect and they have got to come clean to remove shadow of doubt.

Amateur races puts shudders down me.