Double Trouble

Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong, currently two of the most prominent personalities in professional cycling and yet two of the most beleaguered. The former is just about to get his 6th Grand Tour, which includes three Tour de France’s, and still counting. The latter is a retired champion, winning 7 consecutive Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005. With a palmares like that, its an easy ride into the proverbial sunset.

Unfortunately, in the universe that they live and breathe, one could be banned from the sport he is currently dominating while the other could face time behind bars.

These past three weeks, Alberto Contador has simply been the dominating force in the Girod’Italia. He scales steep mountains like they’re downhill’s and he doesn’t even wince as he makes his rivals suffer like dogs in the gutter. If he hadn’t tested positive for the performance enhancing drug clembuterol last year, the cycling world would be his oyster. After he was callously cleared by his own Spanish cycling federation, the UCI, the world governing body of cycling, and WADA, appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The decision was supposed to be handed out early next month but for some reason, has been postponed to September of this year.With such delay, Damocles’s sword is getting harder to ignore.

On the other hand, Armstrong’s grip on his own world, is slowly getting pried open by the revelations last week of a former teammate, Tyler Hamilton, who said that he saw Armstrong use PED’s. This, after the revelations of another teammate and defrocked 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis last year of the same offense. Fortunately for the Texan, both had lied for years about their PED use before coming out clean.

Then last week, one of the claims of Hamilton, that Armstrong and his director sportif, Johann Bruyneel, met with the then lab technician of the renowned Swiss Anti-Doping laboratory in Lausanne laboratory after an alleged positive test in the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, proved true when the said technician and now lab director said that they did meet not for a cover-up but to discuss the test itself, which was new then. Curiously, this was followed by a very generous Armstrong donation of a total $125K to the UCI.

Quo vadis, cycling? In its zealousness to clean up its own house, the UCI has instead set it on fire and the conflagration is far from being controlled. I’m sure other sports are as dirty but cycling is the only sport that loves to wash its dirty linen in public. In other words, you don’t douse a burning house with kerosene. Unfortunately, that how the UCI handles its affairs. How long this problem will cease to be an embarrassment, no one knows. But one thing for sure, we all know that it’s trouble, with a capital “T”.

RACE RESULTS MANDAUE CRIT 2011.5.28: 1- PHILLIP SAINZ, 2- JOEY “SANKX” ONTANILLAS, 3- LYNDYL CARAQUEL