While his brother Frank was meditating on the bad impression he had at the Giro d'Italia, Andy Schleich he kept up the family honor by receiving the yellow jersey from the hands of the organizers of the Tour as winner of the 2010 edition following the disqualification for doping of Alberto Contador. It was May 30th. Schleck was the man to beat also for this year's Grande Boucle which will start today in Belgium with a 6,4km prologue time trial. in the streets of Liège. The young Luxembourg champion was smiling, Christian Prudhomme, patron of the Tour, was smiling, sealing forever the umpteenth story of doping which in fact, once again in the Tour, nullified the results of the field or better of the road. After just a few weeks Andy Schleck is no longer smiling, forced to forfeit the Tour due to a fall during the Tour of the Dauphiné which caused him to fracture his sacrum.
He also trembles Prudhomme not so much because the yellow race finds itself deprived, after Contador, even of its best rival, that is Schleck, but because of the news that Lance Armstrong is investing overseas, with Usada, the American anti-doping agency which formally accuses the seven-time winner of the Tour of Prohibited Practices. Fifteen pages that could upset and rewrite the history of cycling in the last fifteen years. The agency famously said some of the blood samples taken from Armstrong between 2009 and 2010 would be "perfectly consistent with blood manipulation, including that through the use of EPO and/or blood transfusion." ”. The use of performance-enhancing products would be extended over a period of years, from 1998 to 2009, a decade in which the Texan cowboy, after defeating cancer, literally dominated the world cycling scene by racking up seven consecutive victories in the Tour. Armstrong for the moment he was banned with immediate effect from all competitions, even from triathlons – he should have been the great star of the Iron Man in Nice on 23 June – races in which he competes since he retired definitively from cycling in 2011 professional.
The news was in the air, despite the fact that last February the American government had closed a criminal investigation lasting more than two years, conducted by the head of the Foda Jeff Novitzky, at the end of which no irregularities had been found. Among Armstrong's great accusers is his former teammate at the US Postal, Floyd Landis, who pointed to Lance as the master who taught him to dope. But if Landys did not avoid being caught positive enough to see the victory of the 2006 Tour (assigned to the second classified, the Spanish Oscar Pereiro) deprived of Armstrong was checked over 500 times, always passing all the anti-doping gauntlets. After all, a patient with testicular cancer, with a brain operation to block the metastasis, will also have done some particular treatment which perhaps violates the strict anti-doping code. With the common sense of the common man, one also has to wonder how someone who has seen death in the face, as soon as he gets back on his bike, has the unconsciousness to undergo treatments which on health, according to medical literature, can have devastating effects like the epo that clots the blood like a tile.
Angel or demon? Superman or superpharmacist with miracle potions? Usada is not a brotherhood of crazy and incompetent people. The agency lists a series of people who are involved in a perverse system set up in 1998 and exploited to circumvent the laws of sport at least until 2010. There is talk of the Italian "devil" Michele Ferrari, of the Belgian "strategist" Johan Bruyneel , the Swiss "preparator" Jose "Pepi" Martin, the Spanish "doctors" Pedro Celaya and Luis Garcia del Moral. In short: a multinational of illicit practices banned by sports laws from all over the world. Certainly Armstrong, if he has passed all the checks to which he has been subjected, has never managed to overcome and break down the aura of suspicion that the two-wheeled circus has always fueled in the face of his escalation of victories. Victories that have made it a unique phenomenon for its human history in the field not only of cycling but of world sport. This is why Usada's accusations were greeted with ill-concealed satisfaction by those who did not wait for this moment to say: "I told you so….".
Cycling has been accustomed to self-flagellation for years and the more famous the scourge is (see the case of Pantani, transformed in an instant from a hero to a monster to be hunted down in hell) the greater the pleasure of hitting him. Even in the Italian newspapers there was a race for the dalli untore, pointing the finger above all at Armstrong's links with the much talked about doctor Ferrari (there would also be a check for 450 thousand dollars paid by the Texan to the Italian doctor). There is no doubt that the dossier collected on Armstrong's account is rich and detailed. The fight against doping is sacrosanct but punishments must be as timely as possible. At stake is the credibility of cycling, one hundred years of Giri and Tour.
Because it is right to scrutinize the activity of doctor Ferrari, on whom an investigation has been open for some time now conducted by the prosecutor of Padua, Matteo Belletti, but when, to strengthen the hypothesis of his illegal activity, it is emphasized that this doctor was Francesco Conconi's favorite pupil, the professor - as Corriere della Sera wrote - dear to our Coni, accused of practicing "state doping" in the 80s and 90s in his center in Ferrara, risks ending up with questioning even the successes of Francesco Moser, given that the Trentino champion blindly relied on Conconi's therapies to transform himself from a good rider into a champion capable of winning the Giro, world championship and three Roubaix, as well as breaking the hour record up to then held by Eddy Merckx.
Coppi and Bartali spoke publicly of resorting to the bomb which at the time was a mix of amphetamines. Anquetil defended the need to take medicines and practice transfusions in one of the most grueling sports disciplines and General De Gaulle himself never opposed him. What are we doing? Do we cancel, in the face of similar admissions, also the successes of Coppi, Bartali and Anquetil? It is right to equip oneself with the most technologically sophisticated tools to counter and unmask the latest generation of advanced drugs, but the results and the relative punishment in case of fraud must take place as quickly as possible.
Now if the delay in deciding Contador's disqualification was sensational, which came more than a year and a half after the analysis carried out at the 2010 Tour de France, Usada's allegations against Armstrong come today when the XNUMX-year-old Texan retired from racing some time ago. Investigations that start even from the last years of the last century, investing a period during which Armstrong was checked many hundreds of times without anything ever being contested. And this is where the doping authorities may have gone wrong. Going back to certain suspicious episodes, it appears clear that he used himself with the Texan, also because he had just recovered from cancer, a benevolent attitude, very different from Usada's today. For example, at the end of the Montaigu - Challans stage in the 1999 Tour, the first won by Armstrong, when a glucocorticoid (triamcionolone acetonide) was found in the test by the US rider. Armstrong defended himself by saying that he had followed the doctor's instructions to treat a rash on the shoulder with an ointment (Cemalyt). But according to the subsequent testimony of Emma O'Reilly, a collaborator at the time of the Us Postal, the reality would have been different: the Texan would have undergone a "therapy" of corticoids two-three weeks before and the last injection would have caused the positivity. The UCI acquitted him because the hiring was justified by a medical prescription (provided a posteriori, but in any case accepted by the judging bodies).
About 1999 tours, in August 2005, by which time Armstrong had announced his retirement after winning the seventh Tour of France, the newspaper L'Equipe revealed with lots of unequivocal documents, that traces of Epo had been found in no less than six analyzes by the American during that Grande Boucle. If Armstrong was to be stopped, it had to be done then. After all, those of the Tour, while boasting of being the strictest champions of clean cycling, did not even notice that another winner of the Grande Boucle, Bjarne Riis in 1966, was full of Epo as the Danish rider himself revealed when, however, by now the crime sport was prescribed. The same could be true for Armstrong.
In the worst case of revocation of all his victories, Prudhomme would have to award ex post seven yellow jerseys to the runners-up from 1999 to 2005: in particular Jan Ullrich, who also took a few pills, would end up finding himself the table winner of three more Tours (2000, 2001 and 2003) after having conquered one on the road in 1997. The Swiss Alex Zulle (1999), the Spaniard Josepha Belokj (2002), Andreas Kloden would also enter the increasingly bogus roll of honor of the Tour (2004) and our Ivan Basso (2005). A madness. This is why, in order to be truly such, sports justice should respect the time factor. Otherwise it's chaos. Prudhomme and the organizers are experiencing another most agitated eve of the Tour. We seem to have gone back to that of 2006 when the scandal of the Operacion Puerto exploded, involving Basso, Ullrich and Vinokourov, dismounted before the start.
The Armstrong case, however it turns out, undermines the credibility of cycling and in particular of the Tour with too many yellow jerseys that taste like cardboard, an authentic sword of Damocles stretching over the great French stage race that starts today with the prologue time trial Liège. Great absent Andy Schleck, this Tour, the 99th in history, sees Vincenzo Nibali as a possible third wheel in the challenge between the big favorite, the Englishman Bradley Wiggins, and Cadel Evans, last year's winner. With the one hundred and more kilometers of time trial Wiggins, with Fabian Cancellara the strongest time trialist around today, starts with a measurable advantage of five-six minutes over Nibali and at least a couple of minutes over Evans. The Briton has won all the week-long stage races he has participated in this year: Paris-Nice, the Giro di Romadia and the Dauphiné. No longer very young (he is 32 years old), a great track racer, up until last year Wiggins had won nothing (or almost) in road racing. Like that Hesjedal who surprisingly brought back the last Giro d'Italia and who is expected to be confirmed at the Tour. Names until recently almost unknown and today also popular with bookmakers as proof of how short of champions current cycling is, furthermore stranded by excellent disqualifications.
