2011: Me And Pro Cycling

Since I've become involved in triathlon, I've become a pro-cycling fan.  And it's funny - even though I've gone to plenty of triathlons as a spectator, and have watched triathlon, swimming and running events on TV, they don't hold the same thing for me that cycling does.

The first time I watched pro-cycling on TV was in 2009.  It was in mid July, so it must have been the Tour de France.  I remember liking the commentators right away.  I also remember being drawn in by the fluid motion of a hundred tightly bunched riders dressed in all sorts of colorful kit moving at 30 + MPH like one.   But after about an hour, we had an earthquake.  And after an earthquake, the web browser is immediately pointed to the USGS Earthquake page and television is changed to the local news channel.  The Tour was forgotten.

After that, I never did get around to watching any more cycling that year.

Fast forward to 2010.  I was surfing through the channels one Sunday in April and Versus was showing Paris Roubaix.  I don't remember how much time was left on the race, but by the time I tuned in Fabian Cancellera had broken away from the pack and was on his way to winning.  It was the same commentators that I had heard the year before, and I quickly learned that their names where Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin.  As the cameras followed Cancellara to the finish in Roubaix, I was struck by how he made going fast look so easy.

From there, I watched everything I could find.  In May, Ian and I drove up to Big Bear to watch the finish of one of the Tour Of California stages.  The lead riders blew by us in a flash, but it was thrilling.  On TV, I watched The Tour of Romandie, The Giro d'Italia, The Tour de Suisse, The Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana.  The voices of Phil and Paul became an inseparable part of the coverage.  These guys love working together and they love cycling; as a result they added so much value to the broadcast.  It's truly a chemistry that you don't find very often these days when it comes to TV sports coverage.

I learned as much as I could about the art of racing.  I wasn't so much into a team, but I got into riders - Cavendish, Chavenel, Schleck, Hushovd, Nibali, and so many others.  And since every good sports fan has to be a hater too, I chose Contador.  It was a great summer.  I loved it.

But that love was not without guilt.  As I dug deeper into the sport, I uncovered how screwed up the sport is, especially when it comes to doping.  I'd always been aware that there was an issue with doping in cycling in the sense that one picks up on stuff like this from here and there.  But I had no idea how deep the problem ran, how long it been around and how it had evolved into a conspiracy of doctors and science.

I went into the winter knowing two things.  One was that I could not wait for the 2011 season.  The other was that I wanted to come to some sort of understanding about doping.  Well, the 2011 season is here.  But I have have yet to come to an understanding about doping.

You'd think getting a grip on the doping thing would be easy - it's wrong and that's the end of the story.  But what made it more confusing wasn't all the dirt that came out in the off season about who got caught doing what and when, but how the UCI, WADA, and all the national anti-doping are unable to deal with the problem with any consistency.  It's almost to the point where (and I don't REALLY mean this) doping should just be legalized, the cost of such programs should be an accepted line item on a team's profit and loss statement and the athletes should just be able to what they please.  Because then you'd have consistency.  It would be a messed up, dangerous, and unsportsmanlike consistency, but a consistency nonetheless.

I don't usually do this, but I'm just going to bury my head in the sand and enjoy the 2011 cycling season, warts and all.  I'm looking forward to the mid-summer's night routine of staying up late with a bottle of mineral water watching the day's DVR'ed action.  And I'm looking forward to taking Ian to the Tour Of California again this year.  Because even though a cyclist's guilt of doping isn't mitigated by a lack of proper oversight on the other side of the equation, it will take both sides working together to solve the problem.  But both sides are so far off, and there's nothing I can do about it.  So I won't make it my problem, and I'll watch cycling for what got me into it in the first place - the fluid motion of a hundred tightly bunched riders dressed in all sorts of colorful kit moving 30 + MPH like one.  It's all I can do.

More Op-Ed: Doping

Joe Camp left a comment on my post from a few days ago about the recent doping allegations made against Alberto Contador.  Joe's comment was well thought out and very detailed.  Since I completely agree with his take on the US media coverage of doing in cycling and also find the science very interesting, I e-mailed him and asked if he'd like to expand on his thoughts by writing a guest blog post.

Joe lives in Chicago and has worked in pharma-related field for the last 10+ yrs, first doing bench research and then later moving over to the business side of drug development.  He started doing triathlons in 2007 and recently, through some fairly random luck (as he put it), found himself competing at the Age Group Sprint World Championships in Budapest.  He also wanted to point out that he did not win.

The below is 100% Joe's writing (like I really know what Clenbuterol is anyway), so the opinions expressed are his own.

  

A couple days ago Patrick posted his thoughts on the recent round of doping announcements – the most notable being Alberto Contador’s positive test for Clenbuterol and his subsequent “bad meat” explanation.  I’m no Contador apologist – that little pistol gesture he makes is pretty childish and he certainly seems to lack a bit when it comes to social grace.  But he’s a transcendent bike rider and the work he put into improving his TT’ing is admirable and made him the champion he is.  So when I heard of this recent positive test bringing down yet another tour winner -- a race that had me riveted for three whole weeks (I was rooting for Schleck) -- I wanted a better explanation than what I was getting from the typical news sources. 

I posted a comment to Patrick’s post expressing my skepticism.  Patrick liked what I had to say and asked me to expand on the idea.  A couple disclaimers first – I do not have a PhD and this is not my life’s work.  I have a degree in biology and I spent 2.5 years working in a pharmacology lab measuring drug concentrations via HPLC as part of drug interaction studies we had underway.  HPLC is the most common way to measure the amount of substance in someone’s blood or urine and I’m sure that a significant portion of the testing WADA does utilizes this technique.

The majority of what has been reported on this case involves UCI’s accusation and Contador’s response and other people’s opinion on the subject.  But I would like to focus attention on the actual numbers reported in the release – namely the 50 picograms/ml of Clenbuterol that was found in his urine(1).  It frustrates me that they report that number without providing any context whatsoever.  That is a barely comprehensible amount of any substance to be found.  It is totally and completely negligible under any other circumstance.  Some context:

-A small paper clip weighs about a gram.  One teaspoon is about 5 mls.

-There are one trillion (a million millions) picograms in one gram.  So in the case of AC – he had 50 trillionths of a gram of this substance in less than a teaspoon of his urine.  This is definitely below the threshold at which he would gain any therapeutic/performance enhancing value from it.

-Not once in our lab we were ever able to detect anything to the level of picogram/ml.  We were ecstatic if we detected anything at a level of nanograms (a billionth of a gram)/ml.  We also reported and published our data in numerous peer-reviewed journals.  I bring this up only to say that this level of detection was universally accepted and that picogram/ml detection was unnecessary.

-Most notably I think – the report even states that the amount was 400 times less than the amount WADA labs are needed to test for (I’ve also seen this number reported as being 40, not 400 times less).  Regardless, the question needs to be asked -- then why were they testing at that level???  Were they looking for controversy???

As I mentioned in my initial response to Patrick’s post -- trace amounts of pharmaceuticals at similar levels to what we’re discussing here have been detected in water supplies in several cities around the world.  Researchers in Wadenswil, Switzerland, found clofibric acid - a widely used cholesterol-lowering drug - at concentrations from 1 to 100 picogram/ml in nearby (post-treatment) lake water (2).  Notice the concentrations are very similar to Contador’s.  Closer to home, at Tulane University, testing showed that fully treated tap water had concentrations of the hormone Estrone averaging 45 parts per trillion with a high of 80 parts per trillion(3).  A quick conversion shows that this is again similar to the levels that Contador had.

My main point is this – if testing is going to be carried out at such minute quantities, then accommodations must be made for environmental factors that could generate a false positive.  We live in a world in which we are exposed to miniscule amounts of all kinds of things we have no interest in using or ingesting.  Some of these things will make their way into our bodies.  We also live in a world of incredible technological advancement.  From what I’ve read, Clenbuterol has been around for decades.  If you give a bunch of scientists 20 years to develop a test, they’ll generate a pretty darn good test.  Then it becomes of a matter of how good of a test is actually needed.  Or more importantly -- how good is actually appropriate when environmental factors are properly considered.

All of us face the possibility of something showing up in our bodies that we did not intend on being there.  The (fortunate) difference between us and Alberto Contador is that most of us will never know what these things are.  In the end I still don’t know if Contador cheated or not.  In this case, though, I think there is enough data to put our prejudices and personal judgments aside and allow for the possibility that he really did eat some funky meat.  I also think there is enough data to demonstrate that UCI and WADA need to do a better job of policing the sport.  Their readiness to accurately and appropriately monitor their own internal testing procedure doesn’t seem to equal to their readiness to accuse and to vilify.

1.http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/alberto-contador-suspended-over-traces-of-clenbuterol-from-tour-de-france-test

2.http://www.sciencebase.com/drugs_in_water_supply.html

3. http://ag.arizona.edu/azwater/awr/july00/feature1.htm

More Doping In Pro Cycling

Alberto Contador press conference

It was reported last week 2010 Tour De France winner Alberto Contador and 2010 Vuelta a Espana runner-up Ezequiel Mosquera are now suspected of doping due to positive in-competition drug tests.

There have been other recent announcements made by the UCI involving other riders suspected of doping this season, but I can't keep track of them all because there are so many.  Then there is the Floyd Landis  thing from May and the subsequent grand jury investigation into whether or not other US cyclists have committed any crimes by doping.  This obviously puts Lance Armstrong in the cross-hairs.  I'm sorry that this may offend, but I believe Lance is as guilty as they come.  And it's too bad, because the good he has done outside the sport is substantial.

Ezequiel Mosquera

The thing that drives me crazy about all of this is that it's straight up, enabled, unapologetic cheating.  And to try and hide the cheating, the behind-the-scenes stuff that comes with it is nasty, dirty and sad.  It's plays out so crooked that it's easy to forget that the players are professional athletes, "doctors" and "scientists" as opposed to meth dealers and street thugs.  Take Contador - he wasn't that well liked before these allegations broke.  Now he is going to take another hit to his credibility.  But what was he doing when these positive tests first surfaced in August?  Moving over to Team Saxo Bank to race for Bjarne Riis, another admitted doper.  On what planet does this make any sense?

Academically, I get doping - the second guy does it because the first guy did, and thus feels like he has no choice.  And the first guy does it because he's afraid that if he doesn't, the second guy will.  Add to this that sponsors pay big money for one thing - results.  It's a pressure cooker.

I guess what I don't understand is why it can't be cleaned up.  Actually, I think I do understand, but I hope I am wrong.  The UCI is engaged in a game of political double speak.  Doping is wrong - it runs contrary to everything we as a society believe about sport.  But doping is OK - Epic battles up the roads of the Alps and finishing sprints in excess of 70 KM make for good TV and happy sponsors.

I'm caught up in my own game of double speak.  I cringe every time I read a new report of doping.  Yet I am watching the World Championships as I write.  And I watched every second of the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana this year.  As much as I am against doping, I can't get enough of the excitement of cycling races.

I don't know where this is all going.  Cheating is nothing new - cyclists used to jump trains at the Tour.  And the UCI is compromised, that's for sure.  Yet since I generally distrust the typical "World Organization for X" anyway, I could make an argument that WADA is fighting back more to make a political point than to affect change.

Why do the doping scandals play out like a bad James Bond movie when in baseball stories like this pass through the news cycle and are left for debate by sports talk radio hosts when it's time to debate Cooperstown nominations?  My guess is that this is because cycling as a whole has managed to make itself guilty before proven innocent.  Because too much has happened already. So why don't we call it like we should see it?  I'm all for due process, but how about harsher punishment - Is two years enough?  "Life" sounds good to me.

I don't know the exact mechanics of the relationships between the UCI and the Pro Tour teams.  But I do know this - an issue even remotely close to a cycling doping scandal would never be allowed  to get this out of hand in the NBA or the NFL, especially if it was this endemic.  And by the way,  I don't see much evidence of declining attendance, diminishing revenue and lack of commercial opportunities in these two leagues.

This issue is way more complicated than a ten or eleven paragraph blog post, and I'm no expert anyway.  But I've been a sports fan for years and nothing "dirty" that has come out of sports bothers me like the dirt coming out of cycling.  Maybe it's because I am a little more bought in to cycling, but this all leaves me with a sense of unease I won't get the next time I see a picture of Jose Canseco, that's for sure.

War Of The Superbikes

This stuff keeps getting better and better. Not only do we need to be concerned with with pro cyclists injecting Erythropoieten and Testosterone, now Fabian Cancellara (who won Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders) is being accused of riding an electric bike.

I'd like to believe this is a crock. But then again, I'd like to believe in Unicorns too. Who knows?

Read the story here.

Floyd Landis

Floyd Landis

A few weeks ago, after I wrote a few posts about doping, I read a book by Floyd Landis. As you may know, Landis won the 2006 Tour De France, just to have the title stripped because of a positive test for a skewed testosterone/epitestosterone ratio. He was also suspended from the UCI for two years.

Throughout the ordeal, Floyd vigourously maintained his innocence by, amongst other things, organizing a long legal battle and writing a book. I thought the book was written pretty well, and it seemed sincere. I felt for the guy. I wanted to believe.

But I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book, because it doesn't matter. It turns out it was all b*llsh*t. Landis admitted today that he used performance enhancing drugs throughout his entire career.

Here is the story on CNN.com

He's also trying to pull down Lance Armstrong as well.

What a loser.