With the Tour de France once again rocked by doping scandals, two M&G journalists offer differing viewpoints as to the Tour’s continuing value, if any.
For: Nic Dawes — the Tour without illusions
I shouldn’t be watching the Tour de France. For starters it is Wednesday, the busiest time at the Mail & Guardian, and I should be watching the African National Congress — another century-old institution now replete with scandal, division and fallen heroes.
It isn’t like I enjoy watching the Tour, exactly. Year upon year of doping scandals have made it difficult to indulge in the two simplest pleasures the race offers — gob-smacked awe at the physical ability of the riders and three weeks of emotional involvement in its unfolding narrative.
It is impossible to involve yourself in a hero’s journey when so many of them have let you down, and it is hard to marvel at a surge of acceleration on some appalling Alpine grade when you suspect it may be fuelled by erythropoetin or blood-doping.
Watching young Italian star Riccardo Ricco charging up the Hautacam last week in the style of his hero, Marco Pantani, gave me no joy. It was a performance, as pro cyclists say when they want to allude to doping ”from another world”, and its sequel — his ejection from the Tour after a positive test — was inevitable.
It gave me no joy, either, to interview Barloworld’s Robbie Hunter, who insisted that the media were responsible for the damage done to the sport by drugs, less than 24 hours before his teammate, Moises Duenas, was caught with doping paraphernalia in his hotel room.
That even spoiled Tuesday’s finest moment, when another South African, who is in no way suspected of cheating, crested the highest road in Europe in first position. Twenty-one-year-old John Lee Augustyn has made it to the literal pinnacle of his sport; he should get uncomplicated cheers.
It is not just the drugs that taint the spectacle. The politics of cycling are a petty distraction, which can have serious consequences for the credibility of the event.
Just ask Alberto Contador, last year’s winner, this year’s Giro d’Italia champion and the best stage-racer in the world. His Astana team has been excluded from the Tour, ostensibly because under a different coach, with different riders, it was heavily involved in doping, but really because of the Byzantine intrigues that are tearing apart the sport at the highest level.
But if I find it hard to watch for those reasons, I find it impossible not to.
The Tour’s combination of ludicrous physical demands, complex tactics and a stupefyingly gorgeous setting make for a three-week drama that sucks me in. No other big-money sporting event is as hard, as beautiful or as complicated, with the play of strategy, team dynamics and individual frailties unfolding in slow motion for most of July.
As this year’s race nears its conclusion, the question is whether Cadel Evans, an Australian on the Silence-Lotto team, can claw back his lead from the well-drilled CSC-Saxo Bank’s Spanish climbing specialist, Carlos Sastre, or whether Russian Dennis Menchov might upset them both.
Simple enough, but it would take pages to explain how we got here — or to debate Evans’s tendency to follow the attacks of others, rather than making dramatic breaks of his own.
But watch him awkwardly muscling his bike through a hairpin bend while CSC’s Schleck brothers make acceleration after acceleration in an effort to break him. Watch the misery of rival riders cracking with a television camera up in their faces, the high-speed crashes and the miserable abandonments, and you may begin to understand the visceral appeal of the event.
As cycling at last makes an effort to clean up its act, police raids, angry sponsors and gut-wrenching disappointment become part of the July story. Shame is along for the ride and it has become integral to the way I watch the tour. Avidly, but without illusion. I hope things will get better for professional cycling, but watching the tour is not going to be easy and that’s exactly why I am here, in front of the television, when I should be somewhere else. Easy is for tennis fans.
Against: Kevin Davie — Why I will not, cannot, watch the Tour de Fraud
Long before the Tour de France became mainstream popular, I became a fan. I don’t remember when this was, but it was probably before Lance Armstrong began his record-breaking succession of wins.
I was channel surfing one night when I came across this amazing sporting spectacle. The event had everything, being a mix of noble tradition, legendary sporting achievement and spectacular scenery, not to mention a dash of lemming-like insanity.
But it was not the cycling that drew me in. It was the television coverage.
With helicopters and motorbikes and expert commentary it is as though you are in the peloton or perhaps, even, in the breakaway group.
You are there when the race is won or lost in near-vertical ascents that seem to go on and on and on. When the riders fall you can feel the pain of smashing into the road, so real is the coverage. It’s the thrill of the ride without a sore bum or the need to do hours of training.
In the interests of full disclosure, you should know that I am not a ”roadie”.
Road cycling does not appeal to me. I think our roads are dangerous enough without spending lots of time on them on a bike. I have completed the Argus and the 94.7 but find both to be a lot of organisational fuss just to be able to ride your bike. The reason you take up biking is to get away from all of this.
The Armstrong years were not to be missed. The contest is meant to be man and machine versus man and machine, but with Armstrong you could easily form the view that he assumed the status of machine when he got on his bike. A machine on a machine versus the rest.
Somehow, for reasons that are not at all clear, the sport of professional cycling has been closely associated with drug-taking. There are also too many of these athletes who have died unnaturally young, drug-taking being the suspected cause.
I am all for drug-taking in sport as I am not convinced that regulation is working or can be made to work. We put pressure on our athletes to perform and for them to access all the science they can to win gold medals or break records.
It may be better to warn them of the consequences (you will be dead before 30) and let them get on with the business of running faster, jumping higher and so on. The purists will not like this so we could run parallel events, where urine and blood samples are taken. So, in the case of the Olympics, for instance, they’d be held every two years, alternating between the pure and drug-enhanced versions. I’d watch both and I am sure that both would draw sponsorships.
There would also be two Tours de France. I’d watch the druggies as I don’t believe there is a cyclist out there who does not take drugs.
This certainly seemed to be the case last year when one after the other of the top contenders were consigned to the sidelines, sometimes with their whole team, when the act of peeing in a bottle showed that their supercharged performance that day was, well, supercharged.
One fellow (I have repressed the names, I am that outraged by them) came back from the dead to win a stage. The commentators were gob smacked. How did he do it?
Well, guess what? The next day he had joined the list of the early departed.
The final straw was the skinny Dane (name also repressed). There he was, the surprise leader. How did he feel? He was living a dream, he said.
Well, so was I. He was my man and I was on the bike with him. Against expectations, we beat off a massive attack on a fierce hill.
But then, incredibly, he was fired the next day by his team because he had not done a drug test some time previously, before the race began, as required. The leader in the Tour de France is the team. This is like the French troops attacking Napoleon or British sailors shooting Nelson.
But they did and he was out. And so was I.
I just don’t want to know.