Cycling, baseball on two paths

Racers feel the fallout from doping-related purges as America's pastime drags its feet

Brian Metzler, Special to the Rocky

Published June 26, 2007 at midnight

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Baseball and cycling are about as different as two sports can be.

One is as American as hot dogs and apple pie and a certain brand of truck. The other gets attention in the United States only if an American is wearing the maillot jaune on the Champs-Elysées.

Despite their differences, each has come to a crossroads after a decade or more of rampant performance-enhancing drug use among some of its top performers.

While baseball has been slow to address the alleged steroid-induced home run surge of the past decade, cycling has undergone numerous acts of self-cleansing to divest the dopers.

And while suspected steroids user Barry Bonds is alternately celebrated and vilified as he inches closer to Hank Aaron's hallowed career home run record, cycling is getting mostly bad press for purging itself of its top riders.

The recent two-year suspension of Giro d'Italia champion and perennial Tour de France contender Ivan Basso was the latest in a long line of sordid headlines.

Perhaps because few of its stars have been busted for drugs, baseball has maintained much of its wholesome American appeal, whereas cycling looks dirtier than some of Tony Soprano's business ventures. And as the home to a major league baseball team as well as many of the country's best professional cyclists, it's as apparent in Colorado as anywhere in the United States.

"I think cycling is to a point now where the only way out of the tunnel is to go straight through it," said Jonathan Vaughters, director of the Boulder-based Slipstream Sports- Chipotle cycling team.

"There's no possibility of a cosmetic fix anymore, and that's good. Everyone is finding out what happened behind closed doors for the past 10 years when everything looked bright and rosy. In a weird sort of way, it's the best thing that could have happened."

A new approach

Vaughters is a Denver resident and former Tour de France teammate of Lance Armstrong, whose name has come up in recent reports that connect Armstrong and Floyd Landis to blood doping.

Despite the bad headlines and his own brush with cycling's dirty side - he has witnessed the doping problems in Europe but denies ever using performance-enhancing drugs - Vaughters is passionate about the future of the sport and the notion it can thrive with clean athletes.

Using a start-from-scratch mentality, he has stocked the Slipstream team with mostly up-and-coming, young riders rather than experienced, possibly compromised, pros. And he has initiated an ambitious program in which athletes are independently tested regularly by the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE), a Los Angeles-based organization created last fall to foster clean cycling.

Five months and 600 clean tests later, the new protocol is being lauded as a small but significant step in helping the sport rid itself of its dirty past.

In addition to being a deterrent to doping, Vaughters says the testing program - it will cost his team about $400,000 this year - is a business model that already is drawing more sponsorship by restoring faith in the sport among potential corporate backers.

He's hoping the transparency of the team's drug-test policy and its 2007 success in domestic and midlevel European races will earn it a wild-card slot in next year's Tour de France.

The ACE testing doesn't specifically look for doping products but for changes in biochemistry that might raise concern. Test results are not divulged to USA Cycling, the International Cycling Union (UCI) or anti- doping agencies, but ACE co-founder Dr. Paul Strauss said, even for an inconclusive abnormality, there are actions a team needs to take to maintain the relationship with ACE.

"Having the sport's governing body act as a police force is only part of the solution," Strauss said. "What we do is allow the teams and the athletes and the sponsors to take responsibility for their own actions and promote clean sport. We give them the tools and resources to do that, and it allows them to make a statement, too."

Whether at home or on the road, Slipstream athletes give one vile of blood and one vile of urine at Quest Diagnostic centers almost every week. Ten of Slipstream's 23 riders live along the Front Range, including Brighton's Jason Donald, who said he has been tested 17 times since February - 15 by ACE and twice at races.

European Pro Tour teams CSC and T-Mobile also have started independently testing their own athletes in the past year, but neither is as stringent as Slipstream's program.

"To get stuck by a needle every week is a pain," said Donald, who finished second in the prologue and 50th overall at the eight-day, 700-mile Tour of California in February. "If it's what we have to do to move the sport to a more clean way of competing, then that's what we're going to do. I consider it very worthwhile and a small price to pay for what the end result will be."

Enduring problems

Drugs, deception and greed are not new to cycling or baseball. Before the steroid era, baseball had problems with players' recreational drug use and also has endured gambling and game-fixing scandals.

The Tour de France has been plagued by doping allegations since the early 1900s, when riders consumed alcohol and inhaled ether to dull the pain of endurance cycling. In 1967, British cyclist Tom Simpson died after using amphetamines to increase his endurance. Since the mid-1990s, steroids, human growth hormone and erythropoietin (EPO) have been linked to top cyclists.

Still, cycling didn't screen for EPO until 2001 and baseball didn't start testing for steroids until 2003. Since then, the sports have taken two different paths when it comes to drug control.

Aside from the 10-day suspension of Rafael Palmeiro in 2005, baseball hasn't uncovered the rampant drug abuse among high-profile stars alleged by former All-Star Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti. But through its governing bodies, anti-doping agencies and a scandal- thirsty bike racing press, cycling has accused, investigated, suspended or coerced confessions from most of its biggest names of the last decade.

Last month, after Bjarne Riis admitted he used EPO while wining the 1996 Tour de France, officials struck his name from the race's official history, even though an official test for EPO wasn't used by the Tour until 2001.

Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour de France winner and perennial contender, was cut from his T-Mobile team in March and retired after being implicated in Operation Puerto, the Spanish blood-doping probe that led to Basso's demise and put Boulder's Tyler Hamilton in suspicion again.

Hamilton, who finished fourth in the 2003 Tour under the tutelage of -Riis, has remained under a cloud of suspicion after serving a two-year suspension for blood doping in the Vuelta a España. He resumed his professional career this year with the Italian Tinkoff Credit Systems team but was suspended by the team in early May because of continued links to Operation Puerto.

Armstrong, who won the Tour seven years in a row while dominating the likes of Basso, Ullrich, Hamilton, Marco Pantani and other convicted dopers, has been suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs on several occasions, but there has never been sufficient evidence for him to be sanctioned.

In 2005, Le Equipe, the leading sports daily newspaper in France, reported that six different urine samples Armstrong provided during the 1999 Tour tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug EPO when examined in 2004 by a French lab fine-tuning EPO testing.

Meanwhile, last year's winner, Landis, expects to hear soon whether he'll receive a two-year suspension for having synthetic testosterone in his body and an illegally high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. If that happens, the Tour de France likely will declare no winner for 2006.

Last week, the UCI asked all 600 Pro Tour riders to sign an anti-doping charter saying they are not involved in doping and promise to submit DNA samples to Spanish authorities investigating Operation Puerto before the start of the Tour de France on July 7.

Part of the discrepancy between cycling and baseball comes down to media coverage and how it shapes public perception, said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

There is a notion that the drug problem is much more pervasive in cycling because it's the only aspect of the sport that receives coverage in the U.S. media outside of the Tour de France, he said. But that might not be true, based on Major League Baseball's test results that suggested that 5 percent of its players tested positive for a banned substance in 2003.

"Just using that 5 percent number, you could have gone to any baseball park on any day during that season and seen someone who was cheating," Swangard said. "The fundamental difference is that media coverage of baseball tends to drown out the steroid issue. In other words, there's always more being written about the game. But in the case of cycling, and to some degree track and field when it was dealing with the same issue, the only time you ever heard about it was when there is a scandal."

Moving on

While the professional cycling circuits in Europe have been rife with doping, the domestic road racing scene has been relatively clean. There are more domestic pro teams than ever, and most have instilled zero-tolerance policies as deterrents to cheating.

There has never been a better time to be a cyclist in the United States, even though the scandalous headlines have made a lot of large American companies gun-shy about sponsorship.

"It think it's unfortunate because it's really killing the image of cycling," said Durango's Chris Wherry, a top-level domestic pro with the

Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team who has turned down offers to ride for European teams because of the prevalence of doping. "It's frustrating because a lot of companies have backed away from the sport."

USA Cycling, the Colorado Springs-based governing body of bike racing, has experienced record growth since 2001. It eclipsed 60,000 licensed riders for the first time last year and expects to keep growing this year.

The biggest growth has come in the 18-and-younger junior category, where membership has ballooned from 900 in 2003 to more than 4,000 this year. Domestic events, clubs and coaches are also growing in number.

"It's messy, and I think everyone will agree that when the opportunities are there and the stakes are high, people tend to cheat. And if you're looking for cheaters, you're going to catch some," said USA Cycling chief executive officer Steve Johnson. "But you can't indict an entire sport because some people cheat. You just have to make a commitment to clean it up. I think what we're seeing is the -real cost of doing that, fulfilling that commitment and making the sport clean."

Not everyone thinks cycling's sanitizing efforts have gone far enough. Durango cycling guru Rick Crawford, a renowned coach and mentor to American riders like Armstrong, Wherry, Levi Leipheimer and Durango's Tom Danielson, thinks a complete restructuring of the sport needs to take place - even if it means not holding major events like the Tour de France or Giro d'Italia.

As a developmental coach in Europe for several years, he witnessed the pressure on riders to perform. But, he said, the problem is not just one of riders doping, it's a systematic crisis that coincides with big sponsorship contracts derived from increased global exposure.

"I would love to believe what is happening in cycling now is a purging and is going to change things greatly," said Crawford, who coaches the Fort Lewis College cycling teams and several domestic pro riders. "But what is depressing is that the problem is at so many levels, not just with the riders doping. It's with the organizations and politics, the UCI, the Olympic organizations. They're made up of people, and people tend to screw up, especially when so much money is at stake."

The same might be said about baseball, which has had record attendance and revenues since the home run surge of the late 1990s.

"If you have a city and you have no policemen, then there's no crime, is there?" Vaughters said. "But if you put policemen in place, then you're going to catch criminals. And when you catch criminals, that's going to make headlines in the media and it's going to make it look like the city has lots of crime. So what's the better solution?

"In the news, what's going on in cycling looks terrible. But to a young rider coming into it right now, it's a really positive thing right now, and that's more important for the sport."

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