CHANGE FONT

Warning: Editorial Rant Approaching

By Jessica | Permalink | 1 comment | August 6th, 2006 | Trackback

There are a few reasons why I stopped posting things here a couple weeks ago. First of all, this thing is called the Tour de France Logue - and when the Tour ended, it seemed reasonable that I stop posting. And then the lingering Tour news was so depressing that, frankly, I didn’t want to talk about it. I’m the quintessential Pollyanna - I want to (and usually do) believe these guys when they say they’re innocent. So it’s just heartbreaking to get evidence to the contrary.

I’m still not 100% sure what to think about the whole Floyd-Landis-on-artificial-testosterone thing. It makes no effing sense that he’d knowingly take something illegal on a day when he planned, from the get-go, to try to win the stage. Stage winners get tested, and every rider knows it. It would have been asinine to have taken something. And, as my husband is quick to point out, these elite athletes are getting pills thrown down their throats, creams rubbed on their skin and even injections - all in the name of legally maintaining that superior form. It’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t know every single thing that was going into their system, that they would be putting their faith in their team doctors to give them what they needed to maintain a high level of fitness without going to the dark side.

Yet it is the riders who are responsible for what is in their systems at all times, right or wrong. If Landis took something illegal, even if he didn’t know he did, and won the stage (not to mention the Tour) because of it, he shouldn’t be able to keep the title. Having said that, if the doping wasn’t intentional, he’ll be hard-pressed to find the culprit, which is too bad - he’d have a helluva case to make against that asshole, having turned him from a money-making machine into someone who likely won’t be able to work in his profession again.

And this is to say nothing of the way the UCI has handled this and other recent doping scandals, either. The very idea that they leaked Landis’ A-sample results early in order to pre-empt a known leak at the lab testing those samples speaks volumes about the lack of control they have over a critical piece of the anti-doping puzzle. If they are to have any kind of credibility in the fight against doping - hell, if they want to make any of the charges stick - they’ve got to clean up their own act. They can’t be pussyfooting around with questionable labs doing half-assed work, and then try to point fingers the other way. Their process has to be squeaky clean - it has to be irrefutable - and at the moment, it’s far from that.

This is not to say that I think Landis is innocent, or that he’s been wronged by anyone - maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t, it’s not for me to decide. I want to believe these guys, and I probably will continue to believe them until the very last shred of doubt is gone. But there’s something larger at stake than just my desire to believe in an athlete - the sport itself is in jeopardy, and somebody needs to realize that. Everyone is acting in their own self-interest at the moment, and no one seems to see that the sport which brought them all together in the first place is in very real danger of drowning amidst the controversy. Who’s going to put aside ego and speak up in the name of sport?

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