Let's Hope Drugs Don't Overshadow This Year's Tour de France

Filed under: Other Sports, Cycling

I was on holiday last week, though the thing about being a sports fan is that you are never on holiday. However much you may think you want a break from it for a while, there is always something that engages your interest, something to stir your emotions.

Down on France's Cote D'Azur, I just had to take in the Diamond League athletics meeting in Monaco, with Usain Bolt making a rare 100 metres appearance. It proved worth the excursion, with more than Bolt to thrill.

Quite apart from the Jamaican dashing home comfortably in 9.88 seconds, there was a remarkable 5,000 metres run by Mo Farah as he smashed his own British record by almost five seconds in 12 minutes 53.11 seconds, the fastest time in the world this year.

It will make him the favourite for the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea next month and should he win there, then favourite for gold at the Olympic Games in London next year. "There's more to come," tweeted Paula Radcliffe, watching the performance on television at home.

You wonder with Bolt, however, whether we have seen the best of him over 100. He confessed after Monaco to concerns over his start, that he will not be running close to his world record of 9.58 this year.

This could, indeed, have been the year that Bolt was beaten in Daegu by Tyson Gay until injury intervened. Now we have to see if the world's fastest man this year, Asafa Powell, can hold his nerve and beat Bolt in a major race or whether he retains his reputation for folding on the big occasion.

It being France, you couldn't avoid the Tour de France either, and this year it was an astonishing race. For days the home nation thought they finally had a winner as Thomas Voeckler wore the yellow jersey before Andy Schleck climbed brilliantly in the Alps, only for Cadel Evans then to produce a scorching time trial and pinch yellow to become the first Australian to win the Tour.

There was also a first Briton to win the green jersey in Mark Cavendish, who took his overall tally to 20 stage wins, five on this Tour, with victory in Paris on the final day. His was another display to astonish as he proved himself unquestionably the finest sprinter in the world.

Is there anything in sport as demanding and requiring so many disciplines as the Tour? It has its long flat stages where the field bunches and the sprinters dominate. It has mountain routes which some of the cars I have owned would struggle to ascend. It also has races against the clock to find those who combine both speed and stamina.

You wonder how they do it sometimes. Sadly, the answer to that wonder has sometimes been drugs.

Like all other sports fans, I want to believe that what I am watching is real. I want to be amazed by running, from 100 metres to 5,000, want to believe that pedalling furiously and climbing, is clean.

Let us hope that there is nothing to come out of the woodwork in the coming months, as has happened in previous Tours de France, and that what we witnessed was genuinely worth our wonder - and the interruption to our holidays.

 

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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/07/25/tour-de-france-drugs-cycling/

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