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Wiggins (left) is regarded as a member of a new clean generation, though his Team Sky’s PR performance has been questionable this week. Armstrong (right) is now disgraced.
There are often great days to get out and ride your bike. After a good nights sleep and a healthy breakfast it can be a nice way to start the day. Heading off out onto a deserted country road, inhaling the crisp morning air, listening to the birds as you feel the cool fresh breeze on your face. Here you are, out getting fit and staying healthy while many are still asleep in their beds. Some days the sun will shine, other days the rain might fall, scrubbing clean the air.
There are days when the sky is blue and others when the clouds roll in. Today is a day with clouds in the sky for many cycling fans.
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Last night I read all 202 pages of the USADA report on Lance Armstrong and found it to be physically easy to read but emotionally sickening. Not that anyone who has been reading sports reports in newspapers and online over the past 15 years with an open mind would have been totally shocked.
But to see it all brought together in unquestionable detail left all hope of journalistic exaggeration flat on the floor.
Mainstream media is having a field day portraying cycling as a more corrupt and crooked field than even politics. But when Paul O’Flynn on RTE news finished his dramatic report with the words ‘Cycling is now proven to be rotten to the core’ it struck a nerve.
Whilst Lance Armstrong may have been the most famous and now infamous cyclist, he was and is not the core of the cycling world. Cycling is about anyone who can throw their leg over a crossbar and turn the pedals.
Cycle racing is just as much about the hardworking A3 from Tallaght who heads out for a 2 hour training spin on a dark winters night as it is about an insecure Texan who would go to any lengths to prove he was better than everyone else.
Festina was a lost opportunity but will this be the same? There is probably another chapter left to reach the tipping point where the book of doping in cycling will be closed to a point where a genuinely clean rider can hope to be competitive in whatever race he focuses on.
Team Sky has been held up as the 100% clean dream team, but they have had a bad few days. Today there are clouds reflecting on the clear Sky team bus.
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Dave Brailsford went on BBC Radio 5 and said of the USADA report on the Armstrong case: “It is shocking, it’s jaw-dropping and it is very unpleasant. It’s not very palatable and anybody who says it is would be lying wouldn’t they?”
Then his team rider Alex Dowsett gave an interview about the findings on TV, saying of Armstrong: “He is still a legend of the sport – a guy who had cancer came back and won the Tour de France. I think it’s not really important and I really don’t think it matters.”
Sean Yates, the team director sportif, said that he saw nothing whilst both riding with and directing Armstrong. He just went out on his bike in the mornings and drove the team car in the afternoon at the Tour de France and came up with a few tactics.
Bradley Wiggins told Sky News that he never raced against Armstrong, conveniently forgetting the 2009 Tour de France where they did race against each other.
When the doping questions are all answered, no matter what the answer, a totally clean rider like Waterford’s Ciaran Power and many others like him, will be able to look back in retirement and along with being able to look his son in the eye, know that 5th and 7th on stages of the Giro and 13th in the Olympic Games road race were genuinely the best that he could have achieved.
Tomorrow morning on my way to work I will go the long way and cross a new bridge looking at the water cascading below. Then I will ride through the park and look up at the big oak tree sand back across the river towards the old buildings of the town.
I will get to work feeling alive and ready for the day ahead.
If it’s fine after work I will spin around the block with my daughters on their bikes. On Sunday morning I will head out with a big gang of friends and do a good hard 100km in 3 hours and feel tired but great afterwards. That pure enjoyment is what cycling a bike is all about and no dope can take that away.
Cheers
Barry
Ciaran Power’s 13th in the Athens Olympics remains Ireland’s best result at a Games
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