Disillusionment

I recently read Jeremy Whittle's excellent Bad Blood, the story of the author's disillusionment with the world of professional cycling and the contagion of doping which pervades the péloton. Whittle was not only a sports journalist, but describes himself as a cycling obsessive, who lapped up the the romance of the Tour de France and its great competitors such as Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond in his younger days before taking to writing about cycling in a professional capacity. Unlike other exposés published in recent years, Whittle's book contains no smoking gun; rather, it is a story of betrayal and shattered dreams, as the cumulative and relentless weight of cycling's drug scandals leaves the author not knowing who or what to believe in anymore.

Anyone who has followed professional cycling remotely closely over the past decade can relate to Whittle's quandary. I first caught the Tour de France bug watching Marco Pantani's epic victory in 1998. The Italian's daredevil style, which seemed almost counter-intuitive to the point of suicidal, won him a huge following. His victory was the antithesis to those of metronomic riders like Miguel Indurain and Jan Ullrich before him, and Lance Armstrong thereafter. By the time Pantani died of a drug overdose in 2004, it was well known that he had been doped in 1998, but he was one of many. Pantani's tragic demise was an extreme case, but the point remains that, as Whittle and Paul Kimmage before him pointed out, the majority of professional cyclists over the past fifteen or so years have been doped. Pantani's outing as a cheat began my own disillusionment with the sport and I have struggled to take much interest in it since.

On my travels through America in the summer of 2007 I recall meeting a Dane who was cycling from coast to coast. By chance, we were staying at a hostel in Memphis which was run by a huge cycling buff from South Carolina, and as the Tour de France was on at the time, cycling naturally dominated the conversation. At that point, every Tour winner since 1996 had either been exposed as a drug cheat, or had a deal of circumstantial evidence amassed against them (Lance Armstrong being subject to huge scrutiny and many accusations, but no positive test to this point). The 2006 winner, Floyd Landis, had been stripped of his crown. Cycling needed, yet again, some positive publicity.

During my week in Memphis, the Tour was being led comfortably by the Dane, Michael Rasmussen, who seemed poised to win, and hopefully restore some pride to the battered classic. My new Danish friend, Henrik, went to great lengths telling us how we really could trust Rasmussen, how he was definitely clean, and we all wanted to believe this was true. Such was his enthusiasm that another hostel visitor posted a sign - purely as a practical joke - stating that Rasmussen had been disqualified from the Tour. Mortified at first, Henrik laughed at it afterwards, only for the joke to become reality the following day, as Rasmussen was dropped by his team for a number of testing violations (he never tested positive, however).

I have seen sports fans crushed after particularly painful defeats. I have been in the doldrums following certain games (Ireland-Spain 2002 being a particular low point). Henrik's reaction was beyond anything I had witnessed before. It was beyond defeat - it was a betrayal. Before my eyes I witnessed his own disillusionment with the sport hit him like an ACME anvil hitting the Wiley Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

If you're a cycling fan, it seems that these things will come to you. As Whittle's book demonstrates, in cycling's recent history, nobody is above suspicion.

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It seems to me that there is a great parallel between cycling's current predicament and that of baseball. The past few months have seen more scandalous revelations pertaining to the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in the sport. First the sport's brightest star, Alex Rodriguez, was revealed to have failed a test in 2003, and subsequently admitted to juicing. In the past week Manny Ramirez was suspended for fifty games for a positive test for a women's fertility drug often used at the end of a steroid cycle. With new revelations emerging about his alleged use, the pitcher Roger Clemens broke his public silence on ESPN radio to continue his denials of any wrongdoing in the face of a good deal of circumstantial evidence. As one commentator put it yesterday, Clemens was like Seinfeld's George Costanza, who once remarked that 'it's not a lie if you believe it.' The shadow of Barry Bonds' home run records still looms over the sport.

Everyone is a suspect. We know from Senator George Mitchell's (very limited) report that there was no profile for baseball's drug user - it could be the skinny utility infielder or the bullpen specialist as much as the musclebound slugger. A huge number of players were using and not just to set records, but to break the major leagues in the first place and make a decent living. This is not dissimilar to Paul Kimmage's description of systematic abuse amongst the lowly domestiques of the péloton - they simply wanted to hang on. Before last week, most fans thought that Ramirez was too lackadaisical to stick to a drugs programme. But apparently he did.

Everyone is a suspect and increasingly it is a case of guilty until proven innocent. This was hammered home in a recent column by ESPN's Howard Bryant, himself an author of an exposé on steroid use in baseball a couple of years ago. Just before the Manny Ramirez story broke, Bryant had interviewed David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox, a feared home run hitter as recently as two years ago, who inexplicably (or explicably, depending on how cynical you are) has yet to hit a home run this year. In Bryant's article, he discussed many reasons for Ortiz's struggles with the hitter, but never even broached the topic of PEDs. This was spite of the fact that Ortiz and Ramirez were teammates for the former's most productive years.

Bryant wrote a follow-up article describing how he had received 109 emails from readers regarding the piece, only one of which did NOT take him to task for neglecting to mention PEDs. Ortiz has no connection (as far as is known at present) to shady gyms, personal trainers, dealers, supplements, or the like, but still many fans assume his guilt.

Is a collective disillusionment taking over baseball?

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The point of this article is to ask quite simply: what is it that we, as fans, seek in sport? It cannot, simply, be escapism. It has to be a certain type of escapism. Until the respective drug stories emerged both cycling and especially baseball were enjoying huge popularity (the epic, and steroid fuelled Home Run Chase of 1998 essentially saved baseball in the aftermath of the players' strike of 1994 and brought the fans back). Would fans rather be left willfully ignorant?


I am not sure there is an easy answer. I was captivated by Pantani in 1998. Would I feel differently if he had never been caught? The fact remains that there are many prominent sportsmen who use, or have used in the past, that we are unaware of. Certainly we know this to be true in baseball (seeing as A-Rod's name was one of 104 positive tests taken in 2003 which were supposed to be kept anonymous). The rewriting of sports history - especially a history which we have lived and loved - leads to confusion above all, certainly in my case. If we accept that anyone is potentially guilty, then the feats of the past must be glossed over. The only positive is that, in theory, stricter drug testing should clean up sport in the future.