The Song Remains The Same

In his latest pronouncements on the state of professional cycling, Pat McQuaid now opines that the Landis scandal wasn’t the worst to hit cycling and doesn’t have the most devastating impact. He says that Operación Puerto is far worse than the Landis affair. According to McQuaid (as quoted in Cyclingnews):

“From my point of view, Operación Puerto was definitely more negative because it demonstrated that riders who have tested negative in the anti-doping controls have in reality resorted to very sophisticated malpractice.

“It is necessary to understand how these things are carried out,” continued McQuaid regarding the Tour de France.

It’s certainly necessary to understand what’s going on in terms of whether athletes can beat the anti-doping system, but Operación Puerto doesn’t demonstrate any such thing. I would bet that in any given pro race in Europe there’s at least one rider who is juiced. But Operación Puerto doesn’t show that any riders who were doping beat the system.

In point of fact, charges against 57 of the 58 riders implicated have been dropped for lack of any clear and convincing evidence of wrong-doing. That hardly suggests that athletes who were doping managed to avoid getting caught. And the last rider not yet cleared of any charges looks to be in the not too distant future.

So how, exactly, does this show that people who are doping are beating the system? It wouldn’t surprise me if it were true, but the evidence McQuaid cites is a bit shaky, to say the least.

And given how things are working out, I can’t see how Operación Puerto is evidence that cheaters are getting away with cheating. Perhaps Mr. McQuaid would like to share some of the “evidence” he’s seen? Because it’s obviously not the same evidence that all the national federations have been looking at and deciding there wasn’t enough there to warrant any action against the athletes accused. Or if it is, it’s clear that a greater number of people are interpreting it differently than Pat McQuaid.

The problem with the Landis accusations and the Operación Puerto mess isn’t that there are riders doping. (And don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing that organized cycling is trying to root out and rid our sport of the cheaters amongst us.) It’s the manner in which the anti-doping campaign is being run that’s the problem. What we’ve got here is “policing” that is more Keystone Kops than CSI.

Instead of attacking Floyd Landis, McQuaid is now shifting his attention to Operación Puerto. When someone starts shifting attention away from something, it makes me wonder why.

Perhaps he’s sensing that the tide is turning and that Landis might actually prevail? Perhaps he’s taken a closer look at the evidence against Landis and has seen how shaky the case against him is? Perhaps he’s trying the same verbal move that Peloton Jim talks about vis-a-vis the sportscaster he remembers from his youth.

Or does he want to take the focus away from Landis and try to puff up the stats by saying that Operación Puerto has been a bigger success in cleaning up the sport. Or is he practicing the political strategy of lowering expectations? OK, that last one’s a bit of a stretch.

Which scandal has been worse for the sport? From where I’m seeing it, it doesn’t matter which scandal is worse. They’re both bad. Very bad. Because when it comes right down to it, it shows up the anti-doping system to be so completely out of whack that innocent riders are being tainted without anything remotely resembling the “due process” the current system is supposed to afford. And the impression it leaves is that the process is, to a certain extent, ineffective.

Now, you can argue till you’re blue in the face that Landis is guilty. Or innocent. Or “not guilty enough that they can prove it.” And you can do the same for all those accused in the Operación Puerto scandal.

It’s ironic that as the sport gets its collective act together the attendant scandals make things look worse than they probably are. The negative attention scandals focus on the sport, along with the inherent bad publicity, should be reserved for when a cheater has actually been found guilty, not when the first tests suggest there’s a problem.

At least then a clever marketing type could spin the situation as, “The system works. Cycling is cleaning itself up.” And all the controversy that currently swirls around these accusations would be avoided, and the athletes could be assured of a process that respects their rights.

In the case of Landis, I think the problem lies mostly in the inability of LNDD to correctly understand and interpret the data, coupled with an overly-literal interpretation of the WADA criteria. In the case of Operación Puerto the problem is a conspicuous lack of evidence. But that lack of evidence isn’t stopping Pat McQuaid from determining the “guilt” of 57 or 58 individuals.

While McQuaid may be shifting the focus from one scandal to another, I’m afraid that the song remains the same. And ultimately, this is the siren song that leads to the slow death of our sport.

I can already picture the grave, somewhere in Paris perhaps, with a monument that reads:

RIP

Yeah, I’m in a dark mood. More than a little pissed-off at the world right now. I’ve seen enough death lately. I don’t want to see the death of the sport I love, too.