I haven’t been writing about professional road racing very much lately because I’m disgusted with it. I still love the one-day races, but doping is ruining the Grand Tours. If you follow that side of the sport, then you probably know the UCI on Monday cleared Chris Froome of any wrongdoing despite a test last September that showed he had an asthma drug in his system at two times the concentration allowed by anti-doping rules.
That’s right folks: last September. Froome and Team SKY management took a chapter from the old Lance Armstrong book: Deny, Delay, Denounce.
Froome’s side of the story goes something like this: He never did anything wrong. If the test showed too much asthma medication in his system, then it can only have happened accidentally, or it can be explained by his unique physiology, or the testing process itself is flawed. And asthma drugs aren’t really performance-enhancing anyway. And it’s none of your goddamn business in the first place because the results of the test should have been confidential, but now that you do know about it you had better be on Froome’s side because any criticism of him or of Team SKY is only jealous hatred.
The jealous hatred argument reached its apex of absurdity on Sunday after the Amaury Sport Organization (ASO) attempted to ban Froome from this year’s Tour de France, which will begin on July 7. Froome’s fanboys took to social media to decry the action as an attempt by the French to exclude a non-French rider from the Tour. We were here before during the Armstrong years. The argument was complete crap then and it’s complete crap now. In truth, the ASO’s announcement was a calculated maneuver that forced the UCI’s hand. The ASO got exactly what it wanted: Froome will participate in the Tour because the UCI says it’s OK. The ASO didn’t have to make a controversial decision. Its race will feature the defending champion, and that’s good for business even if most fans are lining up to root against him.
Back in May, with the Froome question still unanswered, the Giro d’Italia also recognized that a race without Froome would be seen as second-rate. But the Giro wasn’t a politically savvy as the Tour: it claimed it had a guarantee from the UCI that Froome’s participation would not be nullified even if he subsequently were found guilty of doping. Shame on the Giro for asking for such a guarantee, and shame on the UCI for undercutting the anti-doping movement, even if it only discussed the possibility and didn’t actually give Froome a free pass.
But nothing undercuts the anti-doping movement so thoroughly as yesterday’s decision. The UCI demonstrated its inability to adjudicate a doping claim against a star rider. It ran out of time and it simply gave up.
Time is a hugely important concept in all of this. For example, the time to argue about whether a drug is performance-enhancing in any concentration, or what that concentration is, or how much natural variance can occur within a population of athletes, is before that drug becomes part of the testing protocol. Once it does, then as an athlete you are bound by that limit and you are in violation of the rules even if you exceed that limit accidentally.
And how about the time an athlete should be allowed to respond to a doping claim? Wasn’t 9 months more than enough? There’s no reason to think the Froome fiasco would be over if not for the ASO’s power play on Sunday. Froome and Team SKY showed themselves to be more than content to let things drag on indefinitely, despite weak protests by Froome that nobody wanted a quick resolution more than he did. What incentive did they have to bring things to a conclusion, given that they were allowed to keep racing and to retain the results of those races?
Well, you did it, Chris. You won. But you’re mistaken if you think that what you did was good for cycling or that you convinced anyone who wasn’t already blindly following you. You exposed the impotence of the UCI and set back the anti-doping cause by at least a decade. We’re one step closer—a big step closer—to tossing out the entire charade. When road racing becomes an anything-goes exhibition with all the athletic credibility of professional wrestling, what will you think of your legacy?
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