Tour Director Prudhomme - Cycling’s Voice of Reason (For Now)

By Jessica | Permalink |

No Comments | January 17th, 2007 | Trackback

prudhomme

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme doesn’t want to name names, but he’s hinting - strongly - that riders whose names were associated with Operacion Puerto may not be allowed to start the Tour this year: “I am not going to name names but there people who have made errors and who have been at fault,” said Prudhomme. “They are several different riders with different teams. I don’t want to give specific names – people may want to hear them but that is not a concern for me. But we will take our responsibilities when the time is right.”

Prudhomme made his statements at the T-Mobile team presentation, which he says was in support of the strong stance they’ve taken against doping since the Operacion Puerto affair last spring. He said, “…what T-Mobile did before the Tour was extremely strong; they showed a lot of courage and it was they who made those first moves. I said to them last July ‘wherever you present the team, whether it is in Bonn, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong, I will be there. Because what you have done, what you are doing and what you wish to do is what we need for the future of cycling.’”

I think all fans of cycling will agree that they’d like doping out of the sport. They’d like the athletes to be competing fairly and at the same level. Prudhomme hasn’t always been my favorite person, and his comments at the T-Mobile team presentation are such a stark contrast to some of the comments offered lately by anti-doping officials that they sound like gospel to me right now.

I am a former TV journalist and I am absolutely convinced that if you overcome doping in all sports, then the one with much to gain is cycling. Cycling’s value is a relative one. It is not important whether you race at 38 kilometres an hour or 42… A big fight between the top riders at 38 kilometres per hour with grimacing faces is more impressive than one at 45 kilometres per hour when they are expressionless. So cycling has everything, and I mean everything, to gain by a cleanup.

There is a [long] culture of doping in cycling but now cycling is no different to other sports. We have to go right to the target [to eliminate the problem] and I hope that if other sports are implicated too, that nothing happens to block that process. We are not the judges, we are not the sporting body, but I think we have to do what we can in this fight.

Amen, brother.