Suffering During the Tour de France

From doing the Giro. I kinda hope so.

And there are a lot of people around these parts who are less than thrilled with the way the UCI handles doping, in spite of the fact that more big name cyclists have been caught doping than any other sport in the world.

If you lend any credibility to the Tyler Hamilton allegations about Lance, you can see why.

But there is nothing a day in the mountains of France as far as bike racing is concerned, imo.

my 4- and 6 year old nephews are Contador fans, because he always dances away in the mountains. They shout in iambic trimeter with Spanish accent: “Al-BER-to CON-ta-DOR!” (repeat ad nauseam).

i even have the bike socks to prove it.

Nope. You have a choice in accepting what the various agencies who run cycling promote as rules and how they opaquely and arbitrarily change them. You don’t have to be as powerless as you say.

As an analogy, consider what Desmond Howard says about Reggie Bush and Tyrell Pryor in an equally fucked up sport:

Do I think any other student-athlete has sold something for some money? Yeah. Yeah. Is that a big crime? Not at all. It’s not even relevant. In the (grand) scheme of things, it’s only a cover-up because some guys sat in a room one day and decided, ‘OK, this is going to be illegal.’ Other than that, everybody else on campus can sell whatever they own. But because they’re players, they can’t sell anything they own. It’s almost like they say, ‘OK, you own that merchandise, but in essence we own you, so you can’t do it.’

People are upset that riders/football players are hiding that they broke some arbitrary rules. And yes, the doping rules as they are now constituted are arbitrary and without respect to racing tradition, which is why so many riders continue to break them. You don’t have to buy into what the rich guys say is true.

I don’t understand why AC doesn’t get treated like Fabian Cancellara gets treated in the cobbled classics.

No one should ever work together with AC up a mountain and only Saxo Bank should be closing down the breakaway in mountain stages and teams should try for large and quality breaks to put the pressure on Saxo on every mt. stage from the beginning.

Federer dominant in tennis like no other? What, you kidding me?

NADAL!

Is the problem that Contador has been doping or that he might have been revealed?

Let’s say Contador wasn’t participating, then it would all have been nice and dandy? There would be no question asked about Radioshack? No question about why UCI ranked Tony Martin as suspicious during last year’s Tdf? No question about Fränk having found an alternative to Fuentes? No question about how Andy could follow this doped Contador in the mountains? No question about Fabian having used the doctor who was a middle man for Fuentes?

I have a serious distaste for hypocrites who act up when something is revealed and STILL can’t see what’s actually going on. And using the Giro as example only shows lack of comprehension for how the sport works, the best riders do not participate because their aim is the Tour. The big time deficit is not due to a dirty TdF rider going up against snow clean Giro riders.

Sorry about the outburst, but when people act like the OP did then they are no better than the system they attack(worse, they put law and justice aside)!

The object of a bike race is to win. Obvious, I know. Practically from the beginning, the riders have looked to enhance their chances at doing so. One of the first controversies was riders teaming up to win the Tour, which the organizer hated and called immoral. He rules that you can’t use teams or you’d be thrown out-and he did throw out riders for a few years. The point I am making is that the race organizer was being contradictory in wanting to see the fastest rider while at the same time placing restrictions on how the fastest rider was to be determined. So basically he was making shit up-and trying to take the moral high ground in doing so by calling the busted riders cheats. For years he did not take into consideration the conditions he was imposing on the riders; he was being an autocrat. Only grudgingly did he give way. Thus he set the system in place of the race organizers thinking they had the right to impose any restrictions arbitrarily and to call the racers cheaters, immoral while at the same time goading them on to be first across the line.

When did drug use first creep into bike racing? Probably at the beginning because it has been endemic in industrial working class society since way before there was bike racing. In other words for the bike racers it was just a way to survive really truly grueling conditions, just like it was for their brothers and sisters in the mills and mines. It was not immoral then and it is not immoral now.

And the race organizers, like the factory owners, did not care one bit until it seemed like they had a PR problem. Then they did what any ruling class would do: punish the workers by declaring the practices they did immoral and then illegal. Of course they never looked at themselves and their role in the problem. But they still craved spectacle from the riders. They still wanted romance. They still wanted fiction, make believe. They erect a monument to Tom Simpson on Ventoux when it was they who encouraged him to self destruction. They take no responsibility for the conditions of the race and get their newspapers and websites to print sensational article on how bad/immoral riders are. They sit back and hold their thumbs up or down in judgement on riders because they enjoy the power. They are addicted as surely as any of us.

And for the most part the fans go along with those who hold the power in the sport because like the race organizers they have no real connection to the riders. We all fantasize what it would be like to win Paris-Roubaix and never do drugs or other techniques that have nothing to do with our own muscles come into that fantasy because it is a fantasy. So naturally-and this is true for all the low level bike racers here that read PdC-we think the race organizers are right and anyone suspected in doing something that we never dream of doing is bad, immoral, beneath us.

But again we fans have no freaking clue what it is to race the Tour. Not even the low level racers among us here. We don’t see how warped the riders’ world is. Most of us would, if offered a chance to be on a Pro Tour team and were told what sacrifices we would need to make, would run away from the opportunity and the few of us who would take it up would gladly do whatever it took if their team director would just offer it to us. We would like to do just what Lance and Bert, Cipo and Big Mig, The Cannibal and Coppi did. Isn’t it obvious that drug use is not going away? Not in society and not in the little subset of society that is pro bike racing.

Yes, some of these drugs, maybe all of them, could kill these poor sods racing if they aren’t extremely careful. But that just gets us back to square one: the object is to win. All the other rules are secondary. You then have to ask yourself why each of the other rules are in the rule book and not just blindly accept them. Wouldn’t it be better if the race organizers actually looked into the reasons why riders resorted to drugs? And then possibly changed the conditions so riders didn’t feel like they needed to use drugs? Would that be so hard? Or if not that tolerate the fact that drugs aren’t going away (just like in society) and worked to lessen the harm they cause to the individual riders? Isn’t it obvious that the riders and race organizers should work together? No? Is it really that much more fun to debate weather so-and-so is “tainted” without really having a clue? Do you really like to objectify other people like that? Talk about immoral…

I want the former. I want a sane sport where riders and owners can work together even if they get upset from time to time. I’d much prefer that to the little bit of hell that Tyler lives in, which is the same as the hell that any enabler lives in.