There can have been few more superlative moments in sport. As Michael Rasmussen fought off the repeated attacks from Tour de France number two Alberto Contador on the hills of the Pyrenees this week, it seemed as if the glory days of cycling had returned. The thrill that had long gone in the polished Armstrong era, when his – and his team’s – tactical acumen bulldozed all before it, ensuring that the leader controlled all he surveyed, was replaced with a game of cat-and-mouse.
Racing, finally, had returned to the Tour. What had previously been a procession to a preordained coronation had been replaced with racing, of all things, two men sparring on a mountainside, pushing themselves and their bodies to impossible extremes.
This week’s racing, and Rasmussen’s final, masterful rout of his challenger, has seldom been equalled. But as recently as last week, another rider did something extraordinary in this most extraordinary of events. Alexander Vinokurov improbably overcame lacerations to his knees – the most precious of a cyclist’s limbs – caused by a crash the previous week to win a stage and pedal himself back into contention. It was like Armstrong riding through cancer, or Floyd Landis defying a crumbling hip to produce one of the most memorable of stage wins last year, on his way to the victor’s podium in Paris.
Of course, as we now know, and perhaps as we suspected even as we held our breath and willed the riders to do the impossible, none of this really happened. The land that gave us Baudrillard had tricked us again. Rasmussen did not fend off the forays of Contador alone, Vinokurov had help – in the form of someone else’s blood – on his way to his astonishing victory, and Landis… well, we’ll leave that one for the courts to decide.
How silly of us to believe that man could master the mountain. How could we be so gullible? Do we really have such faith in the myth of the Superman? The Tour de France is an impossible challenge, a superhuman feat of endurance, an ordeal that only the insane and the deluded could contemplate. And, perhaps, the drugged.
Drugs, doping, call it what you will, have long been a feature of the Tour. Indeed, it is doubtful that any of the early – or indeed recent – participants in the Tour made it through the race without some sort of artificial stimulant, whether a nip of brandy to keep out the cold or a dab of cocaine to pep up weary legs. If amphetamines were good enough for expectant mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, they were certainly appropriate for cyclists facing their third climb in as many days in the drizzle of the Massif Central.
But mothers, like cyclists, are no longer permitted their little pick-me-ups. And smelling brandy on a cyclist’s breath is, for the gendarmerie, more alarming than sensing the same odor on a baby.
Should we only accept pure specimens on the mountain? How pure is pure? Should they be free of yesterday’s tonic that has become today’s controlled substance? Should they always have been free? Did they inhale in their younger days?
And what would we miss, should we impose these limits? Do we not enjoy watching and feeling superhuman endeavour? Were we not thrilled by the riding this week?
If watching men in Lycra pedalling up a mountain as they throw water bottles into the bushes is not your idea of a good afternoon in front of the telly, then substitute your own sporting pleasure: baseball, football, skiing, athletics. One competitor’s visit to the chemist’s for a nasal decongestant is another’s trip to Balco.
And think back to the golden moments of sporting glory. Yes, our heroes had comical haircuts and painfully short shorts, but were they clean? Would they have passed? Does it matter? Are they not still our heroes?
Source: Read Full Article