POSTED: May 11th 2011

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JOHN GOODBODY: Contador saga points up issue of Olympic credibility

THE JOHN GOODBODY COLUMN / An authoritative and exclusive series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, May 11: Road cycling appears impervious to the widespread perception that it has lost almost all its credibility. In 1967, Britain’s Tommy Simpson died in the Tour de France partly from the effect of taking drugs. The following year, the race was dubbed ‘The Tour of good health’ as there were attempts to clean up the sport.

Yet here we are 43 years later, with cycling mired in scandal after scandal. Surely it cannot be too long before the International Olympic Committee wonders whether men’s road cycling and  individual time trial should remain part of the Games so infested has the sport become?

Last weekend, the Giro d’Italia began in Turin among a flurry of more doping controversies. Former world champion Alessandro Ballan and his BMC colleague Mauro Santambrogio have been left out of the event, the second most prestigious stage race in the calendar, after allegations were published in La Gazzetta dello Sport about their doping, which the cyclists deny, as does Marzio Bruseglin, who has been omitted by his team, Movistar, in a separate case.

Yet the biggest fish, Spain’s Alberto Contador, has started the three-week race as unquestioned favourite, although his adverse finding in the 2010 Tour de France, which he won, has still not been resolved.

In February, the Spanish cycling authorities cleared Contador of any doping offence because the Spaniard, who has won the last five major stage races in which he has competed, successfully claimed that the clenbuterol, a performance enhancing substance, which was found was found in his urine, was the result of contaminated meat from Spanish cattle.

Both the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the World Anti-Doping Agency have appealed against the decision and taken the case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) for a ruling.

Unfortunately, the case has yet to be heard and therefore Contador is free, technically, to ride. And that is exactly what he is doing.

However, if he were to win and lose the case, he would be stripped of his title, suspended for two years and also banned from the 2012 Olympics – he finished fourth in the individual time trial in Beijing.

Should he have not simply withdrawn from the event ? He doesn’t think so, saying that he is in a different situation from the other riders who have pulled out - "I have been cleared and I hope that in the future there will be the same verdict. You cannot make any comparison between those guys and me.”

The loser here is cycling. We could be in the absurd situation after the race when the CAS rules against Contador –and the odds are that it will since a competitor is ultimately responsible for what he consumes.

The Spaniard would then be retrospectively disqualified from the race, which in itself would become largely meaningless.

The obvious answer would have been for Contador’s team, Saxo Bank-SunGard (SBS), to withdraw him from the race. This was always likely to be a non-starter. The SBS director, Bjarne Riis, insists that as Contador has been cleared by the Spanish authorities then he is entitled to ride.

Riis knows about winning races as he finished first in the 1996 Tour de France. He knows about doping too. In 2007, he admitted taking drugs during his professional cycling career, including when he won the Tour.

** JOHN GOODBODY covered the 2008 Olympics for The Sunday Times, his 11th successive Summer Games and is the author of the audio book A History of the Olympics, read by Barry Davies, the BBC commentator. He was Sports News Correspondent of The Times 1986-2007, for whom he received journalistic awards in all three decades on the paper, including Sports Reporter of The Year in 2001

Keywords · John Goodbody · cycling · doping

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