Respecting the Sport

On February 10th of this year, San Diego’s superstar linebacker Shawne Merriman took the field as a starter in the NFL’s Pro Bowl in Hawaii. Considering his phenomenal athleticism, this wasn’t too surprising. What made his participation remarkable was that earlier in the season, Merriman spent four Sundays watching his team on television as he was suspended by the league for using performance enhancing drugs.
Meanwhile, his primary employer, the San Diego Chargers, enjoyed one its greatest seasons ever, going 14 – 2 and entered the playoffs as a Super Bowl favorite.
This past week, Rabobank, one of the most successful cycling teams in the world, fired its top rider, even as he was on the brink of winning the world’s most prestigious bicycle race, the Tour de France. His crime was suspicious behavior that apparently calculated to evade out-of-competition doping tests.
Earlier teams Astana and Cofidis, were asked to leave the Tour after riders on their teams were found to have violated doping rules.
Rasmussen was fired shortly after his victory in Wednesday’s stage 16. That stage began 11 minutes late as riders protested the shadow that drugs have cast over their sport. Rasmussen was booed as he was one of the first riders to break the strike. The athletes’ attitude today contrasts dramatically from the peloton’s attitude toward doping just 9 years ago. After the number one ranked Festina team had been kicked out of the Tour for using erythropoietin (EPO), the entire peloton staged a sit down strike during a stage to protest enforcement of anti-doping rules.
EPO stimulates red blood cell production and is used legally to treat chemotherapy patients. In endurance athletes, EPO can dramatically enhance the blood’s oxygen carrying capacity.
Today’s riders demand adherence to the rules to restore credibility to their sport. Contrast that with the US professional sports unions that obstruct any attempt to police their ranks.
Cycling’s anti-doping rules are probably the most onerous in sports. To maintain their eligibility, riders must be willing to submit to surprise blood samplings at any time of the year. In fact, riders are not even allowed to travel without informing their federation of where they can be found at anywhere in the world. Imagine having to tell somebody where you are all the time so that they may drop in on you unannounced and draw your blood. That might be a little too intrusive even for a Cialis commercial. Failure to keep his federation informed was what cost Michael Rasmussen his all but certain championship. Even though Rasmussen had skated just to the brink of, but not over the line that would have mandated suspension, his conduct created an air of suspicion that his team could no longer tolerate.
Contrast that with the Chicago Bears’ Tank Johnson, for whom every effort was made by his team, the league, and the Illinois criminal justice system to get him to the Super Bowl on time.
Cycling has a fiduciary interest in cleansing its ranks of dopers. The sponsors demand it. Cycling teams are named after the companies that write the paychecks, and without those sponsors, professional cycling would wither.
Try to imagine what the reaction would be if professional US sports took doping as seriously as cycling. Shawne Merriman would have been suspended from the sport for at least two years and his team’s season would have been over. Nobody would be speculating on how Barry Bonds’ home run records will be treated. His achievements would be wiped off the books.
Unlike cycling sponsors, American manufacturers of beer and erectile dysfunction medication would be object strenuously to similar banishments, as fewer fans would be tuning in to view their advertisements. How many Charger fans would order DirectTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket if the home team were suspended for the season?
Until and unless American professional sports are willing to accept the pain of sincere enforcement, all records and achievements should be viewed skeptically. Cycling is losing sponsors and money in the short term because it desires an honest sport in the future. It’s really too bad that American sports care so little for their own authenticity.
To achieve legitimacy, any sport’s participants must respect the sport itself. That means the sport must be bigger than its biggest stars. Cycling has done that. US football is on its way to joining professional wrestling.