Tour de Doping!

Think of yourself training for a sport 5, 6, 7,…hours a day. When your training day is done, your aching joints and muscles manipulated and soothed by physiotherapists. You sleep and rest thinking of training and when you awake, it starts all over again.

You compete in race, after race, after race throughout the year. You want to make the team and once on the team you have to work hard enough to stay on it for the ‘big’ race. Your body is riddled with broken bones, road scars, and dislocated joints. This is what you do you train and race to become the best. You want to be the best bc you want to prove something to yourself and the world. You learn to suffer to be the best.

Finally the day comes to put all those miles you logged to the test, The Tour De France. You ride with your team and the blood pumps through your heart like oil through a highly tuned Saab engine (oh yes this blog is brought to you by; Saab: made from jets, I can’t stand those commercials). Your team is winning stages and soon your captain could take the yellow jersey all your work protecting him in the peloton is paying off.

Your dreams have come true. This is it you are almost there, only 4 stages to go before possible vict… we are sorry for the interruption but this race has been interrupted for this announcement; "Your team captain and race leader has been found guilty of blood doping" now back to the even currently in progress.

F#CK! The clouds begin to roll in and you feel something other then blood moving through your veins now its acid and bile begins to hit the back of your throat.

"You SOB, how could you be so selfish to have ruined the team’s reputation as elite athletes?" "Why take the chance?" Ahh money and pride, more tempting then honor to some -obviously- you pr!ck.

So now you and your team withdraw it is the only honorable thing for them to do bc you captain is a cheater. You feel ashamed but at least you can hold on to the fact that you have not doped and you will hold on to that as it is the only thing that comforts you now.

I have never agreed with steroid use and have been vocal about it for many years. I have stated in other blogs that I love to challenge myself and to see what I am capable of. Why would I allow a chemical to give me an edge? That is not me doing the work.

So riders dope in the tour bc of the pressures to be the best. To have the advantage and the honor and the money that comes from victory. But I do not respect doping as it is not the true potential of the human body, plus how can you actually be proud when you win with an illegal advantage? is that actually winning?. No sunshine it ain’t!

Especially when it means that if you are caught you take down your entire team and the race becomes a farce. The dialogue above can only be a small percentage of what team Astana is feeling as their team captain, Alexander Vinokourov, was found to have doped and the team had to withdraw. Could you imagine ruining what your team has worked so hard for and they never took the illegal advantage.

Now race leader, Michael Rasmussen, has to try and prove why he did not reveal his whereabouts when it was time for his testing. Hmmm could it be that you were doping Mr. Rasmussen?

These are the riders that give all pro-cyclists a bad rap. See in the world of cycling there is a very small percentage of dopers. But you have the most publicized and anticipated cycling event in the world that is watch by millions. So the world gest to witness several riders every year caught for doping and a dozen more accused of it. It makes it look like it is an epidemic in the sport when in reality, it is not.

So where does this leave me? Well still pissed off and frustrated because every time I watch a stage of the tour I am thinking; is that guy working hard up that mountain bc he has trained hard and has learned to suffer? Or has he been training and then decided to stick a needle in his body to propel him up that mountain?

Maybe I will follow suit along with Zee Germans and stop watching. German TV stations have banned televising the race as a result of the level of doping in the tour. For now I guess I will watch those riders that test negative in every test and are fighting against doping in their sport. A group of teams delayed the race this morning as they refused to race until the association dealt with the doping problem as they were opposed of riding with those who dope.
At least there are the good guys that work hard and don’t take illegal advantages, maybe now with most of the cheaters out of the way the real riders will shine.