Sweet Nothings

Yesterday, I watched highlights of Chris Froome’s latest spectacular Tour de France mountain ascent, where he burst clear from the pack with over 6km left, gaining huge chunks of time right until the end and echoing his mountaintop stage wins in the 2013 Tour. This morning, I sifted through the online postmortem discussions, where the overriding consensus was clear: this guy must be doping. Not only that, but Froome’s Team Sky colleagues Richie Porte and Geraint Thomas also produced stunning rides, beating established team leaders in the process who didn’t have anybody else to work for. Accepted wisdom in cycling says that whole teams can’t be this dominant over the rest of the field without chemical assistance. My favourite is this race from the dawn of the EPO era when three Gewiss riders casually destroy the field at a frightening speed.     Yesterday’s other big story was that somebody appeared to have hacked into Sky’s data logs and had uploaded footage of...

It was the internet that did it for me. I’d been watching the Tour de France every year since the early 90s, but I was hardly a cycling devotee. So whilst I didn’t exactly enjoy watching Lance Armstrong dominate the Tour for seven long years, that was because he always won it so easily with very little in the way of competition rather than due to doping-based doubts. I used to read the Sunday Times during that period too, and I remember reading pieces by David Walsh, one of my favourite sports writers, questioning the legitimacy of Armstrong’s accomplishments. But his was a lone voice at that point. The rest of the media and wider world had chosen, wrongly, to believe in miracles. Then a few years later, in the wake of innumerable doping scandals, I began to read a couple of cycling forums, where the equation was put quite simply. Given that all Lance’s rivals were subsequently busted for or implicated in doping, with EPO and blood transfusions pervading the peloton throu...