lookupsport

So yet another in a long long line of doing scandals has rocked the Tour de France.  Alexandre Vinokourov has tested positive for an illegal blood transfusion after winning Saturday’s time trial.  No real surprise there to be honest looking at the way he finished.

The massive question is why?  Presumably they take drugs to improve their performance and win.  Yet if they win they will undergo a drugs test and not only be stripped of their victory, but be banned and bring the sport they presumably love into disrepute.

It seems impossible to stop these athletes cheating to gain that extra little advantage they might need, and the sport just seems to be spend a fortune on testing and monitoring.  So here’s a radical thought.

Why not remove all drugs testing from the sport, with the exception of the Olympics.  Let these guys pump their bodies full of whatever they want to, with no regard for the long term effects to their own bodies or to the sport itself.  Save all the money time and effort spent on trying to keep the spprt clean as this clearly doesn’t work - they are happy to win by any means fair or foul and so clearly have little or no integrity.  Personally it would be a hollow victory for me if I knew I had cheated to win but it obviously means nothing to these guys. 

I don’t buy the excuse that has been given to me that they all do it  and so need to in order to compete, or that the team doctors just give the cyclists stuff and they don’t know what it is half the time.  I’m certain that I would want to know what was being pumped into my body, and you can’t tell me that Vinokourov had no idea that he was being given a blood transfusion!

The entire sport is under a permanent cloud of suspicion anyway so lets just make it a battle of the synthetic athlete and be done with it.  It is practically that now anyway, and could become a unique experiment on what the human body is capable of when abused to the maximum.