"say it aint so Joe"

A famous question asked by a small boy to Shoeless Joe Jackson about the accusations of baseballs Chicago white sox throwing a world series.

In this case we need another small boy to ask “say it is so Lance” its time for Lance Armstrong to come out and admit what we have all known for a long time that he doped.

I have been a cycling fan since I was a kid watching the Tour de France on ITVs World of Sport programme (for non UK readers it was a Saturday afternoon sports programme that run for 20 years, covering lots of different sports).

Getting into the 1990s much more sport was shown on mainstream channels as they expanded the numbers from the 3 or 4 to hundreds so instead of those highlights we got to see live action in all its wonderful glory, the stunning scenery (unsurprisingly one of the biggest sponsors is the French tourist board) the drama and sheer romance of the worlds greatest race.

Cycling ever since its early days had a drugs problem with the riders taking all sorts of concoctions.  This was bought sharply into focus in the 1960s with the death of the British rider Tom Simpson[1] which at the autopsy they found traces of amphetamines.

A great BBC documentary “death on a mountain” on what happened can be found on YouTube here 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGJsxGFhxg

These drugs and concoctions were really rather minor to what come along later but what they did do was to make it kind of acceptable with the later consequences that a sort of blind eye was in effect not realising the advance in drug technologies. This almost killed the sport.

Moving into the 80s and 90s much more effective performance enhancing drugs were starting to be used Steroids, Testosterone, Human growth hormone (HGH) and then into the 1990s come along what can only be described as manna from heaven for the drugs cheats in endurance sports like cycling, cross country skiing etc.  The name of that drug was Erythropoietin[2] more generally known as EPO. What this drug does was to produce more red blood cells turning the blood stream thicker and making it a super highway for oxygen. The drug itself only had a few legitimate uses (red blood cell replacement in chemotherapy for instance) sales were expected to be low but by one stage late in the 1990s it was the 4^th best selling drug in Europe  

At the time it was undetectable so the authorities used a test called the Hemocrit test which checked the count of red cells, the normal person would be expected to be in the mid 30 to low 40 range so what they did was set a limit of 50 and if anyone found over that were stood down for further tests as it was possible at times for normal reasons the number goes above, and also could be a sign of a serious illness.

EPO gave an increase in performance of around 15% which is absolutely enormous at the elite level of sport so along with testosterone and HGH the performance was truly extraordinary but there was a cost that a risk of a heart attack was a serious danger. In those years there was a high amount of young fit athletes from across the spectrum of sports dying mysteriously in their sleep from heart attacks. There had been stories flying around of people sleeping with heart monitors on which woke them up so they could be found on their bikes on rollers to keep the thickened blood circulating.

After the Festina scandal of 1998 when a team car was found with a huge amount of drugs being carried including EPO, steroids etc that it was certain that some teams were def using.

With this huge increase in performance anyone that wanted to be competitive at the top level would have had to dope.

Lance Armstrong then wins 7 tours from the late 90s until 2005 which in those years and against other caught and admitted dopers is just inconceivable that he didn’t.

Take this YouTube video from 2003 of Lances assent to Luz Ardiden which is a sky resort in the Pyrenees where he is almost sprinting up it, this is not a little ramp. Of the group chasing him just about all of them have been caught, banned or admitted they used EPO. If you watch them cycling up it now it’s much slower and then compare to those days you can see plainly how ludicrous it is trying to claim that it wasn’t drug fuelled. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEqQW1-casM&feature=related

Finally from about 2006/2007 the sports authorities finally got a handle on the situation with better testing and targeting of riders and since then its become a much cleaner sport, I can say with great confidence that the last couple of winners in Cadel Evans and Brad Wiggins that they are winning clean cant of course say for definite as to prove a negative is not possible.

In defence of cycling I would say now that its one of the cleaner sports around as they have tried to do something about it, some sports even now just pays lip service at most.

Cycling and all sport will never be completely clean as there always be some that will cheat at whatever they do in life but hopefully will be a minimum.

So come on Lance say it is so and we can then move on from those years.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Simpson

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin