Jul 24 2007
hors categorie
About Tour de France: now Vinokourov and his team were kicked out. La Tour is getting crazier by the year. It is almost a crapshoot today to call someone a top rider since you don’t know what will happen to him next.
I enjoy watching the Tour every year. Not that I like to watch a bunch of sweaty white guys (talking about the whitest sport, cycling beats out golf AND hockey) wildly shaking their skinny asses on the road. But there is this deeper, almost religious sense of self-torture-till-redemption that has a meta-physical appeal to me.
But endurance cycling has changed a lot from the days when riders shared a cigarette on their way to Champs-Élysées. Today, any tour rider appears to me as a human-bot riding on a sleek machine. I could never forget the image of Jan Ullrich sprinting in the first time trial in 2003 when he beat Lance by more than a minute. That guy looked like a Terminator on a mission.
I suspect La Tour, as the way it is, is no longer sustainable (hijacking a popular term). The challenge it poses to the riders and the hype around it is too much for any human to handle. The fact that a diverse group of riders are using drugs year after year tells me this is a systematic problem not a random one.
If the Tour is serious about solving the doping issue, it has to use a systematic solution as well. I’d propose the following: shift the emphasis on team standing instead of individual ones and adopt a more liberal snitching system.
By becoming a team sport, the Tour can reduce the pressure on individuals and making cheating more difficult to carry out or remain secret. The snitch idea is to borrow the prisoner’s delimma in Game Theory, although this is probably not a very “Frenchy” idea.