Rest Day Reflections on the 1996 Tour de France

By Jessica | Permalink |

No Comments | May 28th, 2007 | Trackback

I’m sorry I didn’t post yesterday; I was actually trying to stay away from cycling on the computer so I could watch the coverage on Versus in the afternoon and be surprised by what happened. And then I had to leave immediately after the show was over for a gathering with out-of-town cousins and… Wait, you don’t really care about all that. Suffice it to say that I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you yesterday; I hope you’ll forgive me.

1996tour Today’s rest day in the Giro gives us all a chance to relax and (at least in my case) sleep in. The cycling world is still reeling, of course, from the doping news of late; Phil & Paul were talking about it yesterday during the coverage, and they brought up one point that people are talking about now that Bjarne Riis has admitted to doping when he won the Tour in 1996. The UCI’s Pat McQuaid has suggested Riis should return his yellow jersey, but to me it’s not clear if he’s suggesting that as a symbolic gesture or that he’s saying the race win should be retroactively awarded to someone else. It seems to me that the latter is just impossible this far in the future. Besides, if “everyone” was doing it in the 1990s, who’s to say “everyone” wasn’t doing it long before that? How far back do you go, taking away yellow jerseys and redistributing them? How far back do you go in rewriting history?

The other thing is that if you look just at the 1996 Tour’s results, you’d have to go a ways down the final GC to find someone who wasn’t suspect in one way or another. Here’s the top 10 in 1996:

1. Bjarne Riis (DEN) Team Telekom
2. Jan Ullrich (GER) Team Telekom
3. Richard Virenque (FRA) Festina
4. Laurent Dufaux (SUI) Festina
5. Peter Luttenberger (AUT) Carrera
6. Luc Leblanc (FRA) Polti
7. Piotr Ugrumov (LAT) Roslotto
8. Fernando Escartín (ESP) Kelme
9. Abraham Olano (ESP) Mapei
10. Tony Rominger (SUI) Mapei

Now, we know Riis was doping, and we know Ullrich was doping (no matter what he says), so let’s go to #3. Whoops, that won’t work, because Virenque was doping, too. Okay, how about #4 - wait, there’s that pesky Festina team again, that won’t work, either. #5? Maybe? But maybe not. Who knows? It’s impossible to say.

If Riis gives back his yellow jersey, it should - in my opinion - only be a sporting gesture to reflect any remorse he feels. But to go back and try to re-award race wins all the way back to who-knows-when is just going to confuse the issue of what’s going on today. It’s been suggested that former riders be offered some kind of amnesty, that they can come out and talk about what they know so we can all learn from it now and keep it from happening again. I’m not sure the anti-doping crusaders would ever go for that, but it seems like former riders are going to be coming out of the woodwork now anyway, amnesty or not.

At any rate, I’ve said that it’s really hard to be a cycling fan right now, and I still think that’s true. When cycling makes headlines in the US lately, that’s not a good thing. Even if your favorite cyclist hasn’t been “outed” yet, you’re probably still squirming a little bit, and with good reason. After all, with this much smoke, there’s bound to be a helluva lot of fire. And yet, to use another goofy saying, the best disinfectant really is sunshine. So all this attention focused on our beloved sport might be really hard to take, what with our friends giving us a hard time about how all cyclists are dopers and cheats (who among us hasn’t heard that at least once?), but I have to believe that in the end all this attention will eventually lead to a sport we can all be proud of. In a few years, when baseball fans are still trying to figure out whether their favorite athletes were cheating their way into the record books, or when cross-country skiers are still incurring fines for doping at the Olympics, we’ll finally be able to hold our heads high and say that at least we dealt with our sport’s doping problems head on.

I have to believe that, because the alternative is to abandon the sport entirely - and I think cycling needs us now more than ever.

photo from Afp