Whether cycling can be said any longer to be a sport at this professional level is questionable. The riders resemble modern day professional gladiators competing for the emperor's pleasure and profit.
Amerikan rider Floyd Landis in particular had a sob story built for him for public consumption as he started to appear he might win in July--"a man who cannot actually sit on a bike" because of medical difficulties and a partner of Lance Armstrong whose job in past races was to create a good air draft for Armstrong.
A good media story is crucial for the business success of the Tour de France, so we know there are corrupt motivations surrounding the sport aspect from all sides. To pick on the one cyclist caught doping would be superfluous, because throwing one out of the sport for a couple years won't eliminate the trickery and corruption of the other supposed athletes and more importantly, their supporters. Throwing out one cyclist preserves the individualist myth with a lie about the system as a whole. In politics, we call this sort of lie "individualism" or possibly Liberalism.
Getting thrown out of cycling means going back to petty-bourgeois life but winning can mean millions of dollars in endorsement deals in many sports. In 2003 CNN reported that Lance Armstrong was taking in $16.5 million a year in endorsement deals. For $16.5 million a year do we think someone had incentive to ingest artificial testosterone, yes. Someone also has incentive to sneak it into rivals' food and someone also has incentive to bribe test officials. What is sickening is how the media cannot face up to all that directly without indicting capitalism.
Sadly, most petty-bourgeois parents would rather explain to their children why one persyn who does not play by the rules gets thrown out of sport than explain what the incentive really is for people in general to cheat and hope not to get caught. That's not to mention the general rotten ethos spread by capitalism where people cheat in sports sometimes just as reflex from past experience under capitalism. Through the overly innocent offerings of adults, children are taught to lie to themselves about individual achievement from a very early age.
This event was in the past a great test of human physical endurance. It is now also like other world sporting events, even the Olympics, a great road test for modern drugs known and unknown. The pharmaceutical companies compete in the real race to provide new and undetectable drugs for the sponsors.
Big imperialist companies are the sponsors and own many world events from football to cycling, just as Coca Cola claims the Olympics as a promotional tool for its company's products.
Drug scandals in professionalised sport are now common everyday occurrences. Landis might get caught out, but the pharmaceutical race will continue. Landis delivered an extraordinary "phenomenal performance" in one daily stage of the 3 week long race and was lauded for his heroism, his will and determined spirit. The labour aristocracy chimed in. U$A,U$A ,U$A as Landis sped to the finish.
The U.$. imperialists crowed, "It was all a great example of 'American spirit.'" And so it was.
But amerikkkan spirit, as Bush proclaims it endlessly, is simply the "Spirit" of profit and of greed and of taking no prisoners as applied to the world of sport.
Attempts to apply and develop common human standards like the Geneva conventions for war or good sportsmanship no longer apply internationally in sport or in war for imperialism, just the class standards and morality of imperialist nationalism and bourgeois individualism.
The only question of standards is: can a big buck be made? Can we cheat and not get caught.
Money has no smell or conscience.
The technologically advanced imperialist countries have the edge in wealthy sponsors, equipment innovation and supplies and in drug development. The poorer Third World athletes can only bring up the rear by competing as mere humyns.
In recent years in the Tour de France the American team led by Lance Armstrong has dominated. Armstrong retired undetected with an official good name.
But it is hard to say how he was actually able to compete so well as a cleanskin with other competitors in a sport so fuelled by drugs. The best that can be said for Armstrong is that he can be given the benefit of the old Scottish jury verdict: "Not proved guilty." Regardless of who had won the Tour these past several years, we would have to say we don't know if it were on account of expensive, undetected drugs.
In the end, with so many business interests involved and to cater to the Amerikan market, after "hearings" and "investigations" by the paid authorities in the Landis case, we will only be able to make a similar Scottish verdict in the current drug scandal surrounding this year's "winner."
Italy too in recent years, had a similar national hero and bicycling star to Armstrong. But now Marco Pantani is dead from an overdose of cocaine, to which he turned for solace for his depression, as the extent of his drug use and reason for his success became known.
Bryan Appleyard wrote a review of a book written on the death of Pantani in the Australian Financial Review on the 7 July 06. That is before Landis was caught and he describes one of these types of drugs and asks some pertinent questions:
"The downside is the thickness of the doped blood and the strain that puts on the heart. Cyclists would go to sleep with monitors that woke them up if their heart rate dropped dangerously low. They would immediately rise and pedal furiously on a bike on rollers in their bedroom to keep the heavy blood circulating. A large number of professional cyclists have died of heart attacks-- r-EPO has not been implicated with any certainty, but the evidence is highly suggestive. On the other hand, there have been periods-- maybe even now-- when all pro cyclists have been doped."There are many questions about how long professional athletes live after doping and how long they would have lived had they not. MIM counts sport as part of gender questions. We hope that men can understand that spectator sports is tainted by money and may even cause deaths, as we know boxing and race car driving do occasionally. Catharine MacKinnon has campaigned often regarding models who have died in the process of pornography production. If we can see the question of what the sport would be without money we can ask the same question about sex and its derivatives like pornography including much pop music in the imperialist countries.
The Tour de France race itself now hardly qualifies as sport. It's now mainly competitive business on bikes for sponsors, and entertainment on TV for passive spectators. But it was and could be again a display of the marvellous strength, persistence and cooperative team spirit that humans can muster against adversity when they set themselves a task.
Imperialist companies and their drugs should be chased out of sport. Only in a socialist world will people be truly able to compete in sport equally in a spirit of international friendship, a world where the people can own and play sport free from capitalist manipulation and championitis and of drug enhancement promoted as humyn "sports."
The "professionalism," the commodification of sports that has developed, is the natural form of sport of the corrupted labour aristocracy in the sporting world. Petty bourgeois business, nationalism and individualism combined. U$A, U$A, U$A.
Note:
http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/03/commentary/column_sportsbiz/sportsbiz/index.htm