Touring On Drugs

Yesterday, the organizers of the Tour de France brought everyone together in Paris to launch the programme leading to the competition for the 100th Tour in 2013.  For the first time in many a year it will be run entirely in France, beginning in Corsica.  It is October 2012 and still the Lance Armstrong saga continues.  Every day there is some new piece of nonsense as the cant and hypocrisy proceeds unabated.  Now the UCI has officially stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France wins and, presumably, they will strip him of every other race win as well.  Floyd Landis has been stripped of his win in 2006 — he did fail drugs tests.  On Monday, Pat McQuaid, the President of UCI called Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis "scumbags" for testifying against Lance Armstrong to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA),  Tyler Hamilton has demanded that McQuaid resigns; a call echoed by Greg LeMond, now the only American who is still in possession of wins in the Tour de France.  But McQuaid has a point.  Lance Armstrong is being made No.1 scapegoat for all drug users in the Tour de France and other cycling events.  Slowly, everyone seems to be coming round to the realization that when Armstrong was winning, there were very few bike riders in long distance road racing who were not using drugs.  They cannot all argue that Armstrong bullied them into using drugs.  Floyd Landis got caught and after protesting his innocence for years finally admitted to drug use and joined the army of testifiers against Armstrong.  Tyler Hamilton was a rider for whom I used to have quite a lot of respect after he got on his bike after a crash on day one in the Tour de France and rode for three weeks all the way back to Paris with a broken collar bone — coming 4th overall in the race.   Now he has testified against his team-mate, Armstrong, and written a book about his experiences as a drug user; a book, which will put him in a good light, will bring him lots of money and, with his testimony gets him off the hook with USADA. It is not a record of high minded disinterested moral principles.There are one or two honourable men who have defended Lance Armstrong.  First among these is Alberto Contador.  Contador rode alongside Armstrong in the Astana Team in 2009, when he [Contador] won the race.  Armstrong had, said Contador, left a lasting legacy in the sport and he criticized the USADA report which relied entirely on testimonies from other riders, anxious to get themselves off the hook.  "Right now people are talking about Lance but there has not been any new test evidence or anything", Contador added.  Condemnation of Armstrong "is based exclusively on witness statements that could have been made in 2005.""What I do know is that if cycling is popular in the USA, it's thanks to him.  If they know over there what the Tour is, it's thanks to him.  If there are top-level teams and races in his country, it's thanks to him."Contador won the Tour de France in 2007 and 2009 but had his 2010 victory struck from the record books after testing positive for a tiny amount of clenbuterol — an amount so tiny that it would not have improved the performance of a gnat.Now various people are demanding that Armstrong pays back his prize-money and various sponsors are demanding their money back.  On the basis that all publicity is good publicity, on what basis do these sponsors think the money should be returned?  Before the great drugs scandal at the Tour de France in 1998, I had never heard of Festina.  And I believe that all the sponsors will have got value from Armstrong.Yesterday, in The Times, Matthew Syed — Sports Feature Writer of the Year — suggested that, if Lance Armstrong was being asked to pay his money back, then so should a lot of other riders.  He particularly drew attention to David Millar — who has become surrounded by his own cloud of self-generated self-righteousness, in campaigning against drugs.   When he was first accused of drug use, he, like all drug users, protested his innocence with great rigour.  When his defence became unsustainable, Millar wrote a best-selling book about his experiences with drug use — and obviously made money out of it.  In 2003, before he started using EPO, he was earning about £250,000 per year.  On EPO, his earnings went up to £650,000 per year — plus more endorsements, etc.
Bike riders used and probably still do use drugs.  I do not think any the less of them for that and neither, I suspect, does Joe Public.  Recent interviews with the man in the street have indicated that most people have assumed for years that bike riders used drugs.  So what?  Bodybuilders use drugs.  Nobody who gets to the point of stepping on stage in a bodybuilding contest has got there without drugs.   Why?  Because [a] to be a muscular freak is impossible without drugs and [b] all bodybuilders want to be the best that they can possibly be.  And so, I would argue, do bike riders.  They want to be the best in a sport which makes extraordinary demands on the human body.  If all riders are using drugs, who is cheating?  The only thing that matters is that riders do not damage their health.  No one rides the Tour de France for health reasons.  For the most part using drugs does not make the risks of health damage very much higher.  Were it not for the anti-drugs industry, it would be much easier to ensure that no drug use was detrimental to health.
Lance Armstrong was the best for seven years in a row in an era when everybody was using drugs.  No furore about his use of drugs will change that. 
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Lance Armstrong Was A Great Bike Racer

I feel rather sorry for Lance Armstrong.  That puts me into a minority group right away.  There was a time, not that many years ago, when men who rode bikes for sport were almost unknown off the European continent.  But not any more.  Britain has moved to the forefront of bike racing on road and track.  We now have a group of men and women who are among the best in the world and at the Olympics in Beijing and London we dominated the racing in the velodrome.  Also, bike riding has been on the rise in both North America and in South America.  And there are many top-rated riders from Australia — the 2011 Tour de France was won by Cadel Evans.  But today no other rider has quite the world-wide profile of Lance Armstrong — a man who recovered from testicular cancer and went on to win the Tour de France seven times between 1999 and 2005.  The problem is the revelations concerning his use of performance enhancing drugs.

I have little time for the anti-drugs establishment.  They are concerned not so much with eliminating PE drugs from sport so much as organizing yet more conferences in Geneva, Monte Carlo, Rio de Janeiro and Sidney — among other cities — in order to discuss the matter yet again.  You will note that they avoid places like Rotherham and Scunthorpe — places that  lack the sea or lake-side luxury of the listed cities.  For years, Lance Armstrong has been insisting that he never used PE drugs and he sticks to that line today.  Officially he never failed a drugs test although it is now being suggested that he did and the result was hushed up by somebody of other.  Nevertheless, it is still the case that he has no record of a failed drugs test against his name.  He has been found guilty of PE drug use by USADA as a result of a collection of sworn statements made by at least ten other bike riders who had been in Armstrong's various teams at the same time and tell us that they saw Armstrong both using PE drugs and handing them out to other riders.  All of them have admitted that they also used the drugs over many years but are speaking out now in return for immunity from any further sanctions.

I have always thought that Armstrong used drugs, just as I think lots of other riders used drugs,  When the Festina scandal broke in 1998 and the team lead by Richard Virenque was forced to withdraw from the Tour de France, there was much unrest in the peleton as French police carried out searches in hotel rooms and in team cars and buses.  Lots of stuff was rapidly dumped and poured down the toilet because Festina had been caught doing something that most other teams were doing as well.  No rider who did not use drugs stood any chance of winning anything in the Tour de France.  Armstrong was just one of many.  He got his first win in 1999 as the recovered cancer patient.  Now USADA have taken away his seven wins because he cheated.  Can they do this?  They did not award him the yellow jerseys anyway.  If he is no longer considered a winner over the seven years, who did win?  And was he 100% clean?   There is no answer to that question.  Is the Tour de France and other cycling races now completely drug free?  I doubt it.  

Today, it has been announced that the Dutch bank, Rabobank is to withdraw its sponsorship of a team in the Tour, telling us that "We are no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport," said Rabobank's Bert Bruggink.  He may be right in one sense; that drug use will continue.  Ten years ago when it was very probable that every team was using something, they were on a level playing field.  I am sorry that Rabobank have withdrawn — it may be a good time to cut back on sponsorship expenditure anyway.  There have been drug issues in the past in the Rabobank team without the bank getting too upset about it.  Before the 1998 Tour, I had never heard of Festina; now I know exactly what they are and what they do.  Is it still not true that all publicity is good publicity?

So Armstrong was just one of many, many riders who used drugs.  He may have been aggressive in encouraging other riders to do the same thing but I do not accept the line that they were pure and clean bike riders until they were forced into the dark arts by Armstrong.  If they didn't like it, they could have gone to another team.  But they knew full well that other teams were filled with drug users and Armstrong's teams were the ones that were doing the winning.

Maybe bike riding is cleaner now — drugwise — than it was but in an era of widespread PE drug use, Armstrong was the best rider in the world.   To single him out like this is OTT and achieves very little.  Interestingly, Richard Virenque — many times King of the Mountains — who admitted his drug use during a trial in France in 2000 is still regarded as a hero in his own country and he is still a commentator on bike racing on French TV and radio.  Perhaps the same will eventually happen to Armstrong.  Bike riders are still the most fantastic athletes on the planet, with or without drugs.  Lance Armstrong will still be remembered as a great bike rider long after all the officials of WADA and USADA have been forgotten.

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Experience Counts

I have posted nothing for six weeks.  I can say that I have been busy — which is partly true — but more than anything I have felt overwhelmed by the chaos.  Most of what goes on around us cannot be made up.  The world's economy is in a mess and primarily it is in a mess because of the EU.  The EU is governed by politicians of little ability.  They are all children of the system.  They discussed politics at university; they became political assistants to other politicians; they became representatives in parliament; and finally, they became ministers, rambling around the world meeting other politicians.  Consequently every daft idea dreamed up in every capital in the world becomes the next government policy that will, somehow, be the answer to all our problems.  It never is, of course.  Politicians rarely learn from their mistakes; our burden these days is that many are incapable of learning from their mistakes.  
Around the world, governments are printing money in order, they say, to stimulate the economy.  In fact, it does no such thing; it puts more money into the hands of the bankers who were responsible for much of the mess in the first place.  Printing money is wrong.  It devalues the currency.  If our currencies were supported by a gold standard, they would not be able to get away with printing money.  In Europe, the euro is doomed.  The right thing to do is to get rid of it; not to insist on more economic integration.  The EU is one of those organisations that, if it did not exist, we would not need to invent it.  It spent Eu126,000,000,000 in 2011 and, in spite of the economic mess they have presided over and which we have to live with, they are already angling for a substantial increase in their budget.  Of the Eu126 billion, Britain contributes Eu12.9 billion.  Were it not for our rebate, this figure would be Eu3 billion higher and second only to Germany.  In the last eighteen months, there has been meeting after meeting after meeting in this or that city to discuss the next application of sticking plaster to hold the euro together. It may be that they can carry on doing this for years, while the rest of teh world picks itself up and carries on without the EU.  The politicians and ex-politicians in Europe like the euro and the idea of economic integration.  It gives them lots of opportunities for jollies and they can govern for the most part without the interference of the electorates.
At present Britain is governed by a collection of rich, posh boys, none of whom has had any proper job, nor even any previous ministerial experience.  When did we last have a government where no senior minister had previously held a job in government?  We will exclude Kenneth Clarke.  He enjoys his politics and he has had many cabinet jobs — and he was a reasonably successful chancellor of the exchequer — because he now has no more than a watching brief. Britain should remain in the EU — on balance — but only if they get rid of the euro and get back to a trading union of independent states.  We do not need a single currency.  It is in no one's interest to continue — not even Germany.  Greece should be allowed to go her own sweet way and a devalued drachma.  And if Greece, also Spain and Italy.  In no country in Western Europe is there any longer any enthusiasm for the EU.  The new members from the east have a different viewpoint.  They see the EU as a protection against intrusion by Russia.  This is a justified and reasonable attitude but it does not need a common currency.
It has been suggested that the British government can escape its problems by allowing the Bank of England to continue printing money to buy government debt, which never gets paid back.  This scheme lies on the road to madness.  This is the thinking of the Weimar Republic, destruction of the currency and hyper-inflation.  This way madness lies but will anyone realize it?
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