Ain't Dat Dope?

A very interesting item in VeloNews featuring an interview with nouveau celebrity bad-boy Bernard Kohl suits my mood today. It's a gray, drippy, cool day, and I'm feeling reflective at best. I'm also taking the week off riding in order to let my body and attitude do some regenerating. Time off training, as healthy as it is, tends make me a bit melancholy. But I had a much better spring than I expected, and it's time to pay the piper -- before he sends the collection boys with the brass knuckles around. I overtrained once, and I plan never to repeat that experience.

Which leaves me surfing the web for interesting reading like this interview. I've been slighly out of the loop with Kohl, but apparently he's been in a National-Enquirer-style tell-all mood for the better part of a year. I don't mind; I think the cycling world really need a dose of reality. As long-time Velophoriacs know, I take a realpolitik view of doping. I would love to have it eliminated from every sport, but I'm pretty sure it's never going to happen. And yet, we have to keep trying to rub it out... it's a slighly absurd co-dependent relationship that's probably never going to change. I posted on this almost exactly one year ago, and am sorry to say that I still feel very good about that post; it's one of my faves.

In VeloNews piece (which itself is about an interview in L'Equipe), Kohl lays out every detail of what he took, when and how. It's sobering (sorry; can't resist a bad pun). He says blood boosting was the only doping he took a chance on during last year's tour. Now, don't get the wrong idea: The caffeine, pseudo-ephedrine, painkillers, EPO, human growth hormones, and insulin -- that was all leading up to July. I mean, why take chances?

He also says that the new Biological Passport program is a farce. It has"...fallen short, and perhaps even aided the more nefarious members of the peloton.
'The top riders are so good at doping that they know what they need to do to keep their blood levels stable to escape targeting,' he said. 'In fact, the UCI has shown us the levels of riders who failed tests. We used that as a reference to follow. The passport has almost helped us.'"

This is exactly what I discuss in that original doping post, referred to above. If you haven't read it before, perhaps now -- a month before the biggest bike race in the world begins again -- would be a good moment to do a little reflecting. You don't need cool, rainy weather like we've got here -- that's just a starting point.

I'm no less a fan of cycling than I ever was. We just have to swallow the fact that life is messy, and then move on.

The Velophoric Year

I love this cartoon. The first time I saw it, I was standing in the service area of my former LBS (much lamented), where it was posted on the wall. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it.)

The beauty behind the humor, of course, it's that there's so much truth to it. Cycling can be much, much more unpleasant than work. And I'm not talking about the long hill-climb or final interval unpleasant; we all not-so-secretly love that pain, or we wouldn't train in this crazy sport. I'm talking about frustration... dark nights of soul... cursing the day you first rode a bike... That kind of thing.

Now, Velophoriacs don't come to this blog for sarcasm or hopelessness. I fall into the "What you put your attention on, grows" school of thought, and, being a therapist myself, I try really hard to walk the talk of staying positive. But it's also important to be real, and part of reality is that even the best parts of life have some extremely crappy moments. Sometimes, especially the best parts of life. So, given that New Year's is right around the corner, and in the spirit of making light of the darkness, I'll do a classic "Year in Review" type piece by re-capping some of my low points for the last year.

In the 15 months since I started training again (after decades away), most of my frustration has come from injury, as is well documented here on Velophoria. Maybe four or five of those months, at most, have been free of worries about or pain from recurrent knee problems. And there were far too many rides cut short, the second half of which I usually spent cursing and grinding away in pain, trying to spin and get home with as little further injury as possible. Also, lots and lots of riding hours spent soft-pedaling, wondering when I'd be able to discover my limits again. Better than not riding at all, but pretty gray winter days, nonetheless.

There were sources of frustration beyond injury, too. I haven't had the money to get the equipment that reflects the type and level of riding I do. I also don't have the money to get a proper, full-scale bike fit, which would probably alleviate the recurring injury. There have been repairs during which I have crouched sweating and cursing next to my bike, running through the directions for the fourth time and still not getting the right results. There were the six or eight weeks of barely riding while recovering from classic overtraining (written up here). I was caught in numerous thunderstorms of biblical proportions 20 miles from home (like this one, for example). The one in Acadia National Park was just miserable, though the first half of the ride was blissful.

I was pretty frustrated when I first moved out here to beautiful Western Massachusetts, because the terrain is way more hilly than eastern Mass; my average speed went way down and I felt like a much weaker rider all of a sudden. That's changed a bit since then, and I've become a stronger rider for it, but I'm still adjusting to the hills to some degree.

Finally, there's the frustration that comes from being a fan of the sport and having to constantly adjust one's head to the "new normal," all the doping, the scandals, the politics and idiotic moves from governing bodies. I took that one head-on in June, in one of my favorite posts ever.

Now, I could sit here and spin all these frustrations into positives, and it's no surprise to loyal readers that each of these challenges has produced its own excellent crop of rewards and lessons for me. I won't bore you with that here. I was just looking through old graphics files and came upon an excellent Calvin and Hobbes, and decided we could all use a laugh, before we turn the calendar over and bump up into Base 2. Happy Season!

Et Tu, Ricco?

So, lots of folks over at the bikeforums Tour de France sub-forum are all up in arms about the fact that Ricardo Ricco of team Saunier Duval failed a doping test and the entire team today pulled out of the 2008 Tour de France.

I said it on the forum today, and I'll say it here: "If you find yourself shocked or surprised by this news, I really think you ought to find yourself a good therapist and have a talk about your grasp on reality." A decade or more of scandals, ejected riders, disgraced or dis-invited teams, and governing bodies eating their own tails, and people continue to feel shocked and disappointed?

I am angry. I am sad. But I don't think I can ever be shocked by the behavior of professional athletes -- or their teams or governing bodies -- again, especially not in cycling.

I purposely did not pay the extra $45 to my cable provider so I could watch the (very good) coverage on Versus this year. Every day, I sorely miss Phil Ligget's voice, the super-extensive coverage, and the abundant, lucid graphics on Versus. I do tune in to the race via the Eurosport audio feed (and sometimes watch one of the free European video feeds along with it on Pop UP TV), but it's a poor man's Tour over there. The various problems with that include 1) unreliable video, 2) visuals not matched to audio commentary, and 3) (and by far the worst:) Sean Kelly's achingly monotonous brogue droning on and on, and adding precious little to my understanding of the proceedings. Sean, you were undisputed royalty on the bike, but I'm begging you: Stop talking. You make my hair hurt.

Still, for all the fun I'm missing on Versus, I have successfully achieved my two main goals: 1) I avoided the inevitable disgust that would ensue at the point when I got totally hooked on the drama unfolding in full color on my big screen – and then some yutz (or yutzes) in the thick of the fight for the jerseys turned up positive; and 2) I'm putting zero francs in the pantalons of ASO, the private company that owns the Tour (and just about every other major bike race in the world -- they even recently started a marketing partnership with the as-yet unsullied Tour of California). I won't get into ASO's surrealistic "business" practices here, nor how they've contributed mightily to the irrelevancy of their own event, and the sport in general. Look here if you want to know more. But remember, you were warned.

Finally, if you want to know where I stand on doping and sport (and personally, I find my position fascinatingly nuanced, not to mention substantiated with masterful dabs of historical reference), check out this earlier post. I really enjoyed writing it, even though the conclusion continues to pain me today -- and apparently will for the foreseeable future.

Doping and Realpolitik

Athletes have doped from day one. When the world was magical, dope was magical; when the world was chemical, dope was chemical; now that the world is biological, dope is biological; when, in the future, the world will be genetic, dope will be genetic…. Competition produces doping, just as taxes produce fraud.
- Paul Fournel, The Need for the Bike

I’m with Fournel.

I don’t support the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I would love to see every sport rid of them forever. Unfortunately, that is a fantasy. A positive fantasy – but it’s important to grasp that, while we should work toward it, it will never happen. Never.

Go ahead -- argue with me. Problem is, I agree with all of your points: It’s bad for athletes. It’s bad for the fans. It’s bad for kids getting into sports. It embodies all that’s wrong with our bigger-stronger-faster, instant gratification, self-absorbed society.

You’re too right.

It’s also as old as sport itself. Endurance athletes in the early 20th century tried anything and everything to get an edge, from cocaine to brandy to doses of strychnine – yes strychine, the pesticide, of which just 5 mg can be lethal. Even athletes in ancient Greece took all sorts of stuff, including stimulants.

Journey with me now, as we turn back the pages of time: Somewhere on an athletic field, thousands of years ago, a trainer was the very first person in history to have this thought: "Hmm... That weird potion that my friend made for my horse to make him run faster… What if I gave that to my runners?’ Of course, the horses collapsed in foaming, bloody convulsions after the race, but our guy wasn’t thinking about afterwards. He was thinking about what he was expected to think about: Winning.
As he walked toward the stables to hide that potion bottle under his toga, he muttered to himself, “Apres moi, le deluge.”

There are parts of this soiled yet beautiful world that will never – never – be as I see them in my heart. I will never be able to admire without reservation the character of a national politician, no matter how much good she or he might do in the world. There will always be parents who raise their children with the most hateful distortions of love imaginable. There will always, until the last day of the world, be motorist who hate us simply because we are riding bicycles.

This isn’t a philosophical post; I’m not saying doping is right or wrong. And it’s not a political post; I really don’t have the answer as to how we should fix this magnificently screwed-up situation. This is a psychological post. It’s about a reality that I’m beginning to grasp.

Now in my mid-forties, I’m just beginning to calm down and simply accept those unchangeable things. They make me sad and frustrated, but letting them make me crazy is a sure road to an impoverished life. I get up every morning and work for positive change, I work toward my ideals of kindness and fairness. The work I do is directly tapped into those ideals. But if I cling to them, I’m doomed. Some days you just have to toss out right and wrong, put on your best kit, and go out and leave a 30-mile streak of melted rubber down the road. Somehow, everything in the world seems in its rightful place when you get back.
I ask you to seriously question, for at least a moment, the likelihood of cycling's governing bodies getting us to where not one person in our sport is doping. The mythical "level playing field," right? I will bet you my left hamstring that there would soon be at least one athlete who thought to himself, “I think I can dope and get away with it. Boy, what an advantage I'll have!”

Human nature has survived in its current form for millions of years. It ain’t gonna be changing a winning game anytime soon.