The Pledge

If you’ve been following the saga of doping in professional cycling, by now you’ve no doubt heard of the UCI’s innovative (or not) approach to solving the doping crisis: Forcing riders to sign a pledge not to dope, and if they’re caught they pledge to give up a year’s salary. Having to give up a year’s income is a powerful disincentive for doping, especially for the vast majority of journeyman pros who make nothing like the salaries of Lance Armstrong and the other riders nipping at his heels back in his heyday.

But will it really stop cyclists from doping? Or is it just window dressing, like the UCI’s testing program announced last February (and not spoken much of since), designed more to give the appearance of doing something about the problem than actually doing something about the problem.

Forcing the riders to sign the UCI’s pledge or face being banned from the Tour amounts to little more than blackmail in my eyes. If you want to ride, you have to sign, whether you intend to follow the pledge or not. The biggest problem I have with the pledge, however, is that it’s another assault on the athletes, without doing anything to improve the testing and detection program.

One thing we’ve learned over the last year is that anti-doping tests are far from a perfect science, and that the standards on what constitutes a positive result vary — at least somewhat — from one lab to the next. Before an athlete should suffer further loss of income (and realistically, once a cyclist is accused, he loses his job and income due to the UCI’s “ethics” requirement that cyclists under investigation be fired by their teams), the process needs to be unimpeachable.

The Floyd Landis case has shown clearly that there is a long, long way to go before the testing regime rises to that level. Standards for determining a positive test result should be the same, from one lab to the next. WADA should not be leaving it up to each individual lab to determine what is and isn’t a positive test result. And WADA should have rock-solid science behind whatever standards they choose. Peer-reviewed research that can be replicated by other labs, consistently.

The whole idea of the pledge, however, is one-sided. What about those who assist the dopers? Team doctors, for instance, or other team staff who are part of the effort. The UCI, despite the word “union” in their name is not a union that represents or defends athletes’ interests. Instead, it’s a “union” of cycling federations, looking to keep their hands on the money and power that come from controlling the sport. What the riders need is a real union. One with teeth to represent and protect their interests. Right now, such an animal doesn’t exist, which is why WADA and the UCI and the ASO feel free to trample the riders’ rights.

As others have observed, if the cyclists are required to forfeit a year’s income, shouldn’t the same hold true for officials who break their own rules? Imagine if Dick Pound or Pat McQuaid were fined a year’s salary for making inappropriate comments about an ongoing case. Imagine if lab managment and staff were fined a year’s salary for leaking stories to the media. Perhaps then the punishment for cyclists found guilty of doping might be acceptable.

But even then, I think not. We’ve already seen that punishment is meted out before the anti-doping process is complete. By the time the Landis case is settled, he will have been out of competition for at least a year. If it goes to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, then it will be closer to two years. That’s two years where he’s not been allowed to race, which (I’m sure) is what he’d really rather be doing.

Sure, punish those found guilty of doping. But inflicting punishment before an athlete’s been found guilty of an infraction is wrong, for the very simple reason that an innocent athlete can suffer great damage to his or her reputation, not to mention income, before a decision is rendered. When an innocent athlete is exonerated, or an athlete is found “not guilty” of doping, will the system restore the income and other opportunities lost? As things stand today, I doubt it.

This new pledge should be seen for what it is, a hollow attempt to convince the public that the powers that be are fighting the evil dopers. And, as with previous attempts at such things, the riders are the ones who suffer under this program, but not others who participate or create the doping programs, to begin with.

Until the system is set up to respect athletes’ rights, every rider on every team slated to participate in this year’s Tour should refuse to sign the pledge. No riders, no Tour. It’s as simple as that. But I’m afraid that many, if not all of the cyclists scheduled to race in the Tour, will sign — if for no other reason than to continue doing what they love to do, which is race.