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Old July 30th 05, 10:22 PM
Mike Jacoubowsky
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Was it really a lie back then? Top riders, including Coppi and Anquetil,
acknowledged using drugs. As Dino Buzzati noted in his articles for
Corriere della Sera while following the 1949 Giro, the drugs used were
primarily to ease pain and allow riders (most often the Gregari) to simply
finish. Benjo has pointed out here that the history of anti-doping is
primarily derived not from Euro attitudes tpward doping but US attitudes
as linked to the Olympics. That has given ride to the lie in the
post-Simpson period.


I think it was an even bigger lie back then. The rationalization that you
took drugs to help you recover or get through the pain, as if somehow that
wasn't something that would improve your chances of winning. Cycling was
then, as it is now, a team sport. If the Gregari dropped out, they'd be of
no help to their team's leader. Call it what you will, but it's still all
about winning.

The notion that you took drugs for "recovery" continued for some time;
frankly, when EPO and HGH came along, at least people were willing to admit
the reasons they took it had nothing to do with recovery and everything to
do with being competitive and winning. And thus at least a tacit admission
that taking such drugs is, in fact, cheating... something entirely different
from the rationaization that it's all about recovery or pain control, just
so you can survive.

But what this thread really begs for is a history of drug controls in
sports. Frankly, I have no idea what was legal and what wasn't back in the
40s and 50s, and I think that has a fair amount of relevance when we're
contrasting now vs then.

--Mike Jacoubowsky
Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReaction.com
Redwood City & Los Altos, CA USA

"B. Lafferty" wrote in message
nk.net...

"Mike Jacoubowsky" wrote in message
m...
The riders may have freed themselves from being prisoners of the road,
but today they are - to borrow the title of the Philip Gaumont's doping
memoir - prisonniers du dopage. In their quest to find the perfect
pharmaceutical solution to the inhumanity of the Tour de France, they
have transformed themselves into something not entirely human. According
to Redeker, "A huge gulf now exists between the race and the racers, who
have become virtual figures, transformed into PlayStation characters
while the public, the ones at the folding tables and the tents, drinking
pastis and fresh rosé du pays, are still real. The type of man once
promoted by the race, the people's man, born of hard toil, hardened to
suffering and adept at surpassing himself, has been substituted by
Robocop on wheels, someone no fan can relate to or identify with."


Right. We should look back fondly on the good old days. Pot Belge. The
choice of "The people's man." A time when riders didn't die in their
sleep, but openly, out on the slopes of Ventoux, as a sporting man
should.

Where do these guys come off, doing this revisionist history garbage? If
they want to make a case for drug use in the present peloton, why do they
think it enhances their case by contrasting it to a lie?


Was it really a lie back then? Top riders, including Coppi and Anquetil,
acknowledged using drugs. As Dino Buzzati noted in his articles for
Corriere della Sera while following the 1949 Giro, the drugs used were
primarily to ease pain and allow riders (most often the Gregari) to simply
finish. Benjo has pointed out here that the history of anti-doping is
primarily derived not from Euro attitudes tpward doping but US attitudes
as linked to the Olympics. That has given ride to the lie in the
post-Simpson period.

I think the author's point is a valid one. The drug use today has turned
the sport into a surrealistic landscape of high tech performance in which
the human dimension has been subsumed by performance levels that are not
believable absent the acknowledgment of the present level of performance
enhancing sophistication. It is completely unlike the period prior to the
1990s and certainly unlike the period in which Tom Simpson died and prior
to that. Rather than riders acknowledging drug use to survive the pain as
in the past, today's riders constantly deny that they (the Emperors) have
no clothes.



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