Vinokourov fails Tour de France dope test

Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

Yet again, a pro cyclist has been caught breaking the rules. In this case Vinokourov, the Astana Albino, was caught with two types of blood in his system. The obvious conclusion is that he is a vampire and was feasting on the race leader, Rasmussen, the night before the Saturday Time trial.

Deflecting attention away from the vampire accusations, Vinokourov, who already has the ear of the Kazakhstan President, made a wild suggestion. After his bad crash at the start of the Tour, which left him with 60 stitiches, Vino's legs had abnormal amounts of blood in them, and that is what has confused the doctors' tests. Nice try AV. A bit like chopping your hand off after stealing something and then blaming it all on the severed hand?

Of course, he is innocent until the B-sample proves he is guilty and lying through his albino teeth, but you have to hold judgement until the definitive results come through. Let's just say Vinokourov is so confident of the results, that his impressive Astana team-mates have all graciously accepted the Tour de France's casual invitation to pack up their bags and piss off back to their barren mountain laboratories.

Victims of team work

It may not look like it, when the only cyclist you know is Lance Armstrong, but the Tour de France is the ultimate team competition, and all the racing you see revolves around 9 team members sacrificing themselves to ensure their leader wins the yellow jersey. All very noble, and at times it is quite moving to see a guy who has been pulling his leader through the mountains, to suddenly reach his limit, blow up and almost fall off his bike in utter exhaustion. But building this team spirit has a bad side.

Cycling is all about money and sponsorship. Sponsors finance teams and the manager is expected to mold a team that can create major publicity for sponsors. In effect, cyclists are human billboard machines whose life is totally controlled by their managers. They eat, sleep and train as per the regimen, and they don't get to choose the regimen. Follow or leave the team - there is no option for athletes who have dedicated their lives to being pros. They follow.

Sometimes, these monks on two wheels have managers who are more unscrupulous than even Vinokourov. The cyclits eat and drink what they are given, unaware of what it is they are taking, trusting their managers to abide by the rules and not kill them. Unfortunately, it is the cyclist who bears the brunt of cheating scoundrels and the mightiest fall in the name of pleasing the sponsors.

The jury is still out on Floyd the alcoholic Landis, last year's TDF winner. Surely his blood sample has dried up by now, along with his wage packet? Going back in time, the jury banned former Tour Winner, Marco the Pirate Pantani and he continued the rest of his short life of destitution and cocaine-clouded days without a bike, before killing himself. Good to be a hero, innit.

I don't know either of those guys, but I do know a bloke called Roberto Heras, (Lance Armstrong's pace maker in the mountain stages in the Tour de France) and it is very sad to see a decent guy banned from earning a living because he was caught with substances in his body that his manager said would be OK.

Cononclusion

At the end of the day, Vinokourov only had a blood transfusion in order to gain an advantage over the opposition, much better than pumping himself full of unnatural substances, like adrenalin. He was caught and it looks like an isolated case and surely most teams have curbed their drug-pushing ways? but I don't think the authorities will ever drive cheating totally out of sport. The bottom line is, if you couple the commitment of athletes programed to win at all costs, with doctors pushing the envelope to get over regulations, and sponsors looking for value, the chemical boundaries will be in flux for ever. And the Vinos and Landises and Herases will bear the brunt.

The fun is over now and the TDF is back on the flat, but if you want to get high, go out on your bike for 20 minutes, pedal as hard as you can, then slump in front of the TV and keep an eye on the TDF riders' speed. Awesome, dude. Of course you could get in shape without drugs and emulate them - once - but you would need other help to perform like that, day after day.