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  The Golden Shot: Has Professional Cycling Doped itself to Death?

The Golden Shot Has Professional Cycling Doped itself to Death?

By Lothar Gorris and Detlef Hacke

Part 2

When Deutsche Telekom came on the scene in 1991, cycling was little more than a glorified local sport. It was relatively insignificant in Germany, a sport of ragtag heroes and shady managers. Deutsche Telekom, the country's former telecommunications monopoly, was the first major corporation to take the plunge and become a sponsor of cycling in Germany. Telekom's move turned out to be worthwhile when the fall of the Berlin Wall unveiled a large reservoir of talented cyclists from the former East Germany.

The greatest of these new additions was Jan Ullrich, who went on to win the Tour de France in 1997. A German corporation and German television celebrated a German hero, while 12 million German TV viewers looked on. Cycling's new fans even remained faithful when, in 1998, the Festina scandal revealed that doping was widespread in cycling. But the Telekom team, as everyone preferred to believe, was still a clean player in a dirty world. It was only last year when, after almost a decade of ignorance and in the wake of revelations about Fuentes, the Spanish doctor, and cyclist Jan Ullrich, that the sponsor of the team now known as Team T-Mobile decided to take a closer look at its investment.

Company executives were so alarmed by the revelations that they already considered pulling out last summer. But T-Mobile, hoping to convert its loss into a victory, decided not to pull out with a big bang. Hoping to avoid negative publicity, it chose to transform its approach to marketing the sponsorship. Instead of highlighting the successes of its magenta-clad cycling heroes, T-Mobile developed a new focus: clean cycling. It was an audacious idea and probably too ambitious.

The team was overhauled and American millionaire and cycling fan Bob Stapleton, a man with no experience in the cycling world, was made T-Mobile's chief of racing. Rolf Aldag, a former professional cyclist who still enjoyed a clean reputation at the time, became the team's sporting director. They installed a monitoring system managed by Professor Walter Schmidt of the University of Bayreuth in Germany, who conducts random testing of team members to uncover possible cases of blood doping. T-Mobile also contributes €500,000 ($690,826) annually to Germany's National Anti-Doping Agency's testing program.

Were T-Mobile Execs Naïve?

Perhaps the people at T-Mobile were overly naïve. The first sign came when they were forced to suspend team doctors Andreas Schmid and Lothar Heinrich after it was discovered that they had provided cyclists with the performance-enhancing drug EPO in the 1990s. Then sporting director Rolf Aldag publicly admitted to having taken EPO himself in the past. But T-Mobile remained steadfast, and when Linus Gerdemann, a young rider on the team, won the seventh leg a little over a week ago and captured the yellow jersey, his performance seemed ample proof that it is possible to be both clean and successful. The fact that he promptly lost the yellow jersey the next day seemed only further proof of his honesty. Suddenly everything was back on track for T-Mobile.

But then, only three days later, came the revelations about Patrik Sinkewitz.

A team can replace its management, its coaches and its doctors, but building an entire professional team of riders who are all beginners and entering them into the Tour is an impossibility. Professionals like Patrik Sinkewitz are all leftover baggage from the old system. Sinkewitz, who has been under contract with T-Mobile since 2006, was a member of two teams in the past that have both been suspected of doping, Mapei and Quick Step. He grew up in a cycling world in which doping and lying about it were par for the course. He is part of a sport in which mental stamina is critical to physical performance, and if that stamina is in short supply, drugs are needed to outwit the body.

Aldag says that he and his fellow managers discussed the team's new approach with riders. "That's precisely what is so hard for us to understand," he says, "Patrik wasn't under any pressure. He could have been the worst rider in the peloton and would still have been kept on the team."

Doping Junkies

But there are other pressures, including the pressure to justify one's high salary and not to be caught at the back of the pack. And then there is the pain of daily training and the fight against one's own body. Professional cyclist Jörg Jaksche believes that regular doping can also produce psychological dependency. "At some point you may have the feeling that you can no longer make it without doping."

This could explain why someone who doesn't need to dope would use performance-enhancing drugs in the first place, and how someone could jeopardize German cycling because he believes he no longer has any choice but to dope.

There are probably many of these junkies in the peloton, including coaches, doctors and team managers. Junkies believe that those who don't dope are limiting themselves. Junkies lie and junkies have no sense of right and wrong. As their addiction progresses, they begin to lose the sense of having a body with limits.

The ARD and ZDF networks, as well as sponsors like Adidas, are determined to stop supporting this addiction. Like T-Mobile, bottled water producer Gerolsteiner and dairy group Nordmilch, also sponsors of professional teams, will decide soon whether to continue promoting the sport. The junkies they have supported, it appears, will soon realize that withdrawal is a necessary part of recovery.

But the reason Germany's publicly funded television networks cited for their decision to cancel Tour coverage -- that they are only interested in broadcasting clean sports -- has long applied to sports other than cycling.

The Japanese city of Osaka will host the world championships in track and field in August. Two of the last three world record holders in the men's 100 meters have been convicted of doping in the last two years.

At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, an army of unknown Chinese athletes will win a slew of gold medals. Many of them will have been subject to almost no serious testing for the use of performance-enhancing drugs. China is expected to be so dominant that officials are already thinking about ways to slow things down. At some point too much gold becomes an embarrassment.

When the ARD and ZDF networks broadcast live boxing matches, no one seems overly troubled by the fact that many in the audience have prison records or represent corrupt boxing organizations, and that they are watching pumped-up musclemen beat each other to a pulp. Gary Player, a former South African professional golf player, said last Wednesday, just as the British Open was about to begin: "I know there are golfers doing it (taking drugs), whether it's HGH (human growth hormone), whether it's creatine or whether it's steroids, I know for a fact some golfers are doing it." So now the epidemic has spread to golf.

Was Cancelling the Right Choice?

Dieter Gruschwitz, ZDF's head of sports, is attempting to defend his network's decision. But he also says: "In the first week of the tour, ZDF demonstrated that it can expose and help eliminate abuses through critical reporting. In this sense I regret the decision to cancel coverage." He adds that ZDF has not yet established a procedure for responding to doping cases in other sports. "We know that we will come under growing pressure to do so," he says.

What happens if the winner of the 100-meter final in Japan tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs? "It would set the wrong precedent if a network's decision to cancel coverage in the future depended on the prominence of a given case," says Helmut Digel, vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations. "That could lead to a paradoxical situation in which those who are serious about getting rid of doping and exposing offenders would simultaneously be dealing a death blow to their sport."

ARD's directors are also in disagreement over whether canceling Tour coverage was the right decision, especially now that private broadcaster Sat.1 has been covering the Tour since last Thursday. The ARD and ZDF networks have apparently paid €7 million ($9.6 million) for broadcast rights to the Tour, while Sat.1 is said to have acquired the rights for the remainder of the tour for a significantly smaller sum. One of the commentators at Sat.1 is cycling trainer Mike Kluge, a friend of Jan Ullrich who once supported the legalization of EPO. At times, the network's commentary during its first two days has been reminiscent of the kinds of wrestling matches that are typically shown on minor networks' late-night programming -- almost as if cycling had returned to its more humble roots.

The reaction abroad to this spate of German thoroughness has been muted. No other television network has discontinued its coverage of the Tour, and nowhere else is professional cycling in jeopardy.

Last Thursday evening, Rolf Aldag spent more than three hours visiting with his presumably doped rider at a hospital in Hamburg. At the end of a leg of the Tour last Sunday, Sinkewitz crashed into a spectator and suffered serious injuries to his face.

Aldag stood at Sinkewitz's bedside, dispensing his advice: "You have three options. First, you didn't dope, in which case you don't have to admit anything. Or you did and you do admit it. Finally, you did dope but you decide not to admit it. In that case you'll never find peace. I know what it's like. I lied for 10 years."

Sinkewitz, still weak from surgery, listened quietly to Aldag's advice. He had just applied for testing of the "B" sample of his blood, which is not likely to happen before Tuesday. The hope of somehow making it, despite all odds, is something with which therapists are all too familiar.