Germans Nach Hause

With all of the doping scandals of the last few months, my interest in the noble sport of cycling had reached an all-time low this year. I didn’t bother to watch any classics this year and even the nearing of the Tour de France couldn’t excite me.

But the Tour’s the Tour and so I forced myself to watch the prologue. Of course, once I beheld the spectacle that is the greatest cycling race on earth, I was hooked again, as I am every year. I soon found myself regretting not having travelled to London for the prologue and opening stage, or at least Ghent a few days later. Lame.

The first week of the Tour was pretty dull, really. The prologue is always exciting, but after that, it was the usual array of flat stages ending in mass sprints. This year, however, they seemed even less eventful than usual, perhaps because the strategy is now so well directed from the team leader’s car that the riders themselves scarcely seem incapable of making a decision. It all seems so directed and choreographed.

Happily, that changed somewhat in the Alps, when men like Rasmussen dared to go out on a limb and go for yellow. And then there was Juan Mauricio Soler’s epic and totally surprising victory. This is the stuff great tours are made of.

Before you know it, though, the D-word is back. Patrik Sinkewitz of T-Mobile is found to have tested positive for an abnormally high level of testosterone during an out-of-competition check back in June. ‘Abnormal’ is putting it mildly, too, as his testosterone level made Floyd Landis’s positive test from last year look like a glass of mineral water. In fact, the level was so high that you have to wonder whether this test was reliable, especially since testosterone doesn’t do a cyclist that much good. It’s pretty much only useful for recovering from heavy exertion, but this was a rider in training, not in competition. If he was using testosterone, what on earth was he thinking?

That’s not the strangest thing, though. German cycling has had a particularly hard time of it over the last few months. Ullrich, Aldag, Zabel, etc. The press conferences had the air of a catholic confessional.

The yellow jersey of Linus Gerdeman a few days ago was therefore a timely blessing for the Germans. At 24 years old, he represents the much-vaunted and already tired concept of new cycling, a man with a clean slate, a man who could wash the German Radsport whiter than white.

And then Sinkewitz happens, another German and, as if that weren’t bad enough, a T-Mobile teammate of Gerdeman. You have to feel sorry for Gerdeman, who suddenly finds himself having to justify the entire sport to hordes of sanctimonious German journalists.

But the strangest thing is the response of ARD and ZDF, the German public broadcasters.

As a surprised Sinkewitz was issuing denials from his hospital bed, where he’s been since a bad fall a few days ago after finishing the day’s stage, yesterday afternoon’s Tageschau was announcing that ARD and ZDF have decided to immediately cease their coverage of the Tour de France.

The reason given is that cycling is currently not a credible sport. Therefore, the companies feel they are functioning purely as an advertising vehicle for the various teams. They further claim that to continue the coverage would be to further damage the credibility of the sport, presumably by further exposing the underbelly of the sport in the form of new scandals.

I find this reasoning absolutely bizarre. Yes, there are bad apples in the sport, but it’s not the fault of the Tour de France, any more than it is the fault of the thousands of German fans or up-and-coming riders like Gerdeman. Don’t these broadcasters have a responsibility to behave like journalists and to refrain from this kind of moral judgement? This doesn’t seem like an impartial, unemotional decision to me.

On a related note, what will T-Mobile do? With so many disgraced riders having ridden for that team and having just received the benefit of the doubt for having purged the ranks of old cycling, how will they now react to the discovery that, no sooner is the ink dry on the new cycling charter, than one of the riders who signed it tests positive?

I wouldn’t be surprised if T-Mobile now withdraws from the sport entirely. Who could blame them, especially in view of the fact that they now can’t even get their shirt logo onto TV screens in their own country?

I don’t approve of the decision made by ARD and ZDF. Cycling is a noble sport that is currently struggling to self-cleanse. It needs support and constant publicity to achieve that, not the summary rhetorical judgments of public broadcasters who do the riders and their fans a serious disservice.

If anything, the latest revelation proves that cycling is a credible sport, for it proves that the drug controls work. The irony is that, without controls, no-one would get caught and the German broadcasters would contentedly cover every stage of every race, ignorant to what was going on behind the scenes. And that, of course, is what happened throughout the nineties and in more recent years.

I’m happy that the NOS aren’t debating whether or not to abandon the Tour. They have expressed their continued commitment to cover the world’s most important bike race, in all of its glory and all of its, hopefully ever decreasing, seediness. After all, that’s what journalists are paid to do and to cover a story, you need to be on the spot, reporting the news as it happens. That’s not something you can do from a studio somewhere in Germany.