A more complete apology to Jay and an explanation. Tour de France Doping Content Inside!

This is yet another response that I chose to put on my web site instead of Jay's cycling board.  Please feel free to respond.  I know I'm over-apologizing for this, but this is my catharsis.  I needed to stay some stuff and it is better that I say it on my web site and not his. :D

 

Thanks!

 

**************************************

 

Hey Folks. 

 

I kinda said a brief apology in the "Lance Has Something to Say" thread, but I thought I'd explain further in a place where it isn't more of a distraction to a thread that I'd already trashed.  Sorry about that Jay. 

 

Anyone who's read my comments on doping and professional cycling knows that I'm more than a little opinionated on the topic.  I've stated my ideas rather forcefully here in the past (probably too forcefully). 

 

I had completely resigned myself to pretty much writing off professional cycling in my mind and doing other things.  It isn't that I hate the the sport or the people doing it.  It is more that I didn't want to consider myself a fan of a sport that I now view as fundamentally flawed. 

 

We've had political discussions here in the past.  I was pretty forceful in my ideas there too.  One point that I always make is when talking on that kind of topic is that most of the time you can get a better view of reality by increasing the complexity of your thought on a particular topic.  Things are never black and white, right and wrong, good or bad. 

 

Friday afternoon I had an experience which helped me add complexity to my view of cycling.  I was included in a press conference with the Discovery Channel cycling team and got to talk at some length with George Hincapie and Johan Bruyneel.  I also got to rub virtual elbows with some of the top cycling journalists in the world.  It was a very cool opportunity to me and it opened many doors to me as a writer/photographer/freelance journalist. 

 

It also added complexity to my view of things.  No longer were cyclists in the TdF abstract entities on the other side of the pond, they were people that had real voices, lives and ideas.  I was taken in.  It was damn cool to be taken seriously by George and Johan.   It was cool to have a discussion with them and have that discussion be somewhat meaningful to them and very meaningful to me. 

 

For a brief period, cycling was redeemed in my eyes.  It wasn't that I no longer considered doping to be an issue in cycling.  It is and always will be to me.  It was that the added detail to my experience showed me that there is a lot of good on the other side of the scale and that it balanced things out to the point where I could look at cycling within the context of doping and find something of value there. 

 

That was the peak.  Now for the valley.

 

The first thing I did after the press conference was to check up on Velo News.  That was when I read the articles about the Spanish doping scandall that had just broken.  I knew a lot of that was coming when Liberty Seguros dropped their sponsorship.  I just didn't expect it to be quite so wide-reaching.   That definitely crashed most feelings of balance that I had.  Though I'm happy at having the ongoing opportunities as a writer/photographer in professional cycling, my outlook is back to being almost exclusively negative. 

 

Again, I don't hate the sport of professional cycling.  I don't hate the riders or coaches or doctors.  They are a product of the sporting environment that I have helped to create.  I just don't feel that it is in my best interest to invest my time, heart and soul to following cycling the way it has developed.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Pete