Cycling's Drug Test: After Years of Doping Controversies, theTarnished Sport Knows It Has to Come Clean or Become Obsolete

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Cycling's Drug Test
After Years of Doping Controversies, the Tarnished Sport Knows It Has
to Come Clean or Become Obsolete

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 29, 2008; E01

GIRONA, Spain Scottish cycling star David Millar was sitting in a
restaurant with two friends when the French police came to bust him.
The dinner intrusion was not entirely unexpected: It was June 2004,
and Millar's French team was the target of a very public, five-month
doping investigation.

The officers handcuffed Millar, who eight months earlier had won gold
in the world time-trial championship, and took him back to his
apartment. As the police searched his home, the lanky 27-year-old sat
in the living room, confident, even cocky. They had nothing, he
figured.

Then in a flash of panic, he remembered the two syringes on his
bedroom bookshelf. When the police found them, Millar's life changed
forever.

Sitting in a French jail cell over the next 47 hours, "I realized I
hated cycling," Millar said in a recent interview. Although he was
drawn to the sport by its profound beauty, cycling's ingrained culture
of doping -- accepted by riders, sponsors, team managers and officials
at the highest levels -- had helped transform him "into a cold
chemical cheater."

Millar admitted to police that he had used the banned blood-booster
erythropoietin, or EPO, three times in 2001 and 2003. Within weeks, he
lost everything he'd worked for -- his world title, Tour de France and
Olympic medal prospects that summer, $650,000-a-year salary, his home,
his team, his self-respect.

Today, the entire sport of cycling is where Millar was four years ago.
Rocked for decades by drug scandals -- most recently during last
year's Tour de France, cycling's marquee event -- the sport has hit
rock bottom, according to riders, managers, cycling officials and
analysts. And with this year's Tour de France and Summer Olympics
approaching, the sport can either come clean and heal itself, or
continue to self-destruct.

"At the end of last year's Tour de France, everyone in the cycling
world -- teams, riders, organizers -- got together and said it can't
continue this way, and if it does, we're not going to have a
professional sport left," said Pat McQuaid, president of the
International Cycling Union (UCI), the sport's governing body.

Cycling is being criticized by fans, media members, sponsors and anti-
doping advocates for fostering an illegal drug culture and a code of
silence to protect it, and according to McQuaid, "The UCI has got the
message." The organization is increasing the number of surprise out-of-
competition drug tests -- the ones that often snare cheaters -- from
170 in 2006 to a projected 10,000 this year, and its anti-doping
budget has grown from $2.4 million last year to $8.5 million in 2008.

The magnitude of the problem is staggering. Since 1995, every winner
of the Tour de France, the Spanish Vuelta and Giro d'Italia -- the
triple crown of professional cycling -- has been implicated in doping,
although many of the accusations have never been proven and most of
the winners profess their innocence. Over the same period in those
races, all but 15 of the riders who collected the 117 first-, second-
and third-place medals have had doping allegations leveled against
them.

"There were lots of warning signs, but they turned a blind eye to it
for too many years," said John Wilcockson, the editor of VeloNews, a
cycling magazine and Web site.

The extent of the problem became public during the 1998 Tour de
France, when the entire nine-man French Festina team was expelled from
the race after a team car was found packed with more than 400 doping
products, including EPO, at a France-Belgium border crossing. The team
director later admitted to employing a systematic doping program for
his riders. Police subsequently raided the hotel rooms of other teams,
and six teams dropped out of the race.

"Ten years after the Festina affair, if everyone had wanted to do
something about it, the problem would be fixed," said Christian
Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France. But instead, the
techniques for doping stayed one step ahead of the technology to catch
it, Prudhomme and others said, and the continued widespread use of
drugs was protected by a code of silence.

In 2004, Millar became cycling's highest-profile casualty. Another
scandal struck in May 2006 when Spanish police raided a Madrid medical
clinic and discovered more than 200 bags of blood, transfusion
equipment, anabolic steroids, EPO and other doping products, along
with coded lists that implicated more than 50 of the world's top
cyclists.

Nine riders caught up in the so-called Operation Puerto investigation
were forced to withdraw from the 2006 Tour de France, including 1997
winner Jan Ullrich, a German, and 2006 Giro d'Italia winner Ivan
Basso, an Italian.

American Floyd Landis, who won the 2006 Tour, subsequently was
stripped of his title after drug tests during the race came back
positive for elevated levels of testosterone. He is the only rider to
lose a medal for doping in the Tour's 105-year history.

Then came last year's Tour. Pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov of
Kazakhstan and his Astana team were expelled five days before the July
29 finish when Vinokourov, the 2006 Spanish Vuelta winner, tested
positive for a banned blood transfusion. The next day, the rider who
had worn the prestigious yellow jersey for eight days as the race's
leader, Michael Rasmussen of Denmark, was forced to withdraw for lying
about his whereabouts when he missed two out-of-competition drug tests
earlier in the year. The same day, Italian cyclist Cristian Moreni was
arrested by French police shortly after crossing the day's finish line
for failing a drug test; his entire team pulled out of the race.

The British press dubbed it the "Tour de Farce." Two German television
stations stopped their coverage of the race, as did a Swiss daily.
France's Soir newspaper ran an obituary saying the Tour had died "at
age 104, after a long illness."

Jean-Francois Lamour, vice president of the World Anti-Doping Agency
(WADA), an independent organization created in response to the Festina
scandal to coordinate the international fight against doping in
sports, suggested that cycling be withdrawn from the Olympics.

In an interview, Tour de France chief Prudhomme said that the drug
problem in cycling "is no different than in any other sport," but its
aggressive testing and public stance to combat doping have helped make
cycling "the black sheep of sports."

Unlike the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and other professional
sports, cycling does not have a strong players' union that fights
against testing and works to keep the results private.

"Cycling is the only sport that has addressed the problem head-on --
it's not just a congressional hearing and a few USA Today headlines,"
said former U.S. cyclist Jonathan Vaughters, director and part owner
of the American cycling team Slipstream, which has adopted one of the
toughest anti-drug postures in cycling.

Millar, who served a two-year suspension, is now back in the saddle as
an outspoken anti-doping advocate. Watching the drug scandals unfold
during last year's Tour de France, he said he was angry, frustrated
and depressed. He had staged a comeback not only for personal
redemption, but because he realized how much he really loved the
sport, and he hoped other riders could learn from his experiences.

But apparently nothing had changed. The riders, the teams, the
sponsors, cycling officials "didn't get the message," he said.

Millar understood the mind-set. In 1999, when he was 22, just a year
after the Festina affair, the members of his team were using EPO and
trouncing their rivals, "and no one cared because we were winning, and
it was literally hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil," he said.

Millar took the yellow jersey in the opening stage of the 2000 Tour de
France, beating American cycling great Lance Armstrong, who won the
Tour a record seven times in a row and was dogged by doping
allegations for much of his career. People were telling Millar that
he, too, could win the Tour de France one day, "and I was thinking,
there's no way I can win the Tour de France unless I'm doping."

Millar eventually became the leader of a team himself, "and I had a
lot of people counting on me for results. The team was supposed to
look after me, but they didn't care, and the sport was not trying very
hard to stop doping, and people were getting caught and getting just
six-month suspensions, and it got to the point where it didn't seem to
mean anything. My value system got all mixed up. I came into the sport
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and that got stripped away."

He confessed because of the alternative: "I knew that whatever
happened, for the rest of my life I would be living a lie." When he
came clean, "It was like a huge weight was lifted off of me.

"I blamed the culture, but I also accepted what I did. It's a fine
balance -- putting your finger up and accepting your own guilt."

This year, Millar is racing on Vaughters's new Slipstream team, of
which he is part owner. The American team, which keeps a base in
Girona, Spain, about 50 miles northeast of Barcelona, has had
difficulty finding a big-name sponsor willing to accept the risks of
being associated with cycling, Vaughters said, and that is willing to
contribute the roughly $8 million a year it would cost to sponsor the
team.

Under Slipstream's $500,000-a-year testing program, Vaughters said,
every rider is tested about every two weeks for doping violations;
unlike the secrecy that surrounds other doping tests in cycling,
Slipstream offers to make all its test results public.

Prudhomme, the Tour de France director, said the organizers offered a
surprise invitation for Slipstream to race in this year's Tour
"because we like their philosophy, particularly in terms of their
ethics and anti-doping measures." The team also will compete on Sunday
at the CSC Invitational, a 62-mile race held at the Clarendon Metro
stop in Arlington.

"I'm very representative of my sport. I cheated, and that's it,"
Millar said. "For the last decade, it's been affair after affair,
story after story, admission after admission, and the fans are finally
giving up. But the doping culture is turning into an anti-doping
culture, and in five years, we are going to be at the vanguard of anti-
doping and ethical sponsorship. It will no longer be -- just take our
$5 million, put our name here, and we don't care what happens. We
could be an example for all sports."

Mike wrote:

news.google.com

Cycling's Drug Test
After Years of Doping Controversies, the Tarnished Sport Knows It Has to
Come Clean or Become Obsolete

Can I belch, fart and yawn at the same time ?