How Surprised Are We?

Michael Rasmussen wins the 16th Stage

The great thing about sport is its predictable unpredictability. There you are enjoying one of the best tours in recent years when all of a sudden the field is decimated. Firstly there are rumours, then there are blood doping accusations and then finally, just when you were hoping you could pull the yellow jersey over your eyes to make it go away, one of the pre-race favourites and current leader is sacked.

Michael Rasmussen protested his innocence after being sacked and withdrawn from the Tour for lying to his Rabobank team about his whereabouts in the build-up to the event. This came less than twenty four hours after another pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov exited the race after failing a blood doping test. His Kazaksthan based team claimed they were leaving the race for the good of the sport, the organisers claimed they had been told to leave.

When I was at the Prologue in London, only three weeks ago but it seems a lifetime, much of the talk in the morning was about Floyd Landis, the 2006 winner, and his ongoing trial in America. There seemed to be an atmosphere/attitude that somebody was going to get caught this year and it wouldn't really be a surprise.

Professional Cycling isn't the only sport where performance enhancing drugs are taken, in fact a quick google will show that Athletics and Rugby Union appear in various drugs cases, but it is one of the most visible, particularly on the continent. Footballers are given drugs to help hasten their recovery from injury, cricketers the same - but they aren't considered to be performance enhancing. I suppose that a serious of cortisone injections in the knee of England's football captain which will ultimately lead to premature arthritis, but mean that he can carrying on playing through the injury isn't really performance enhancing - it's performance defining.

Seb Coe, back when he wore a vest and shorts in his day job, said that drugs tests weren't working because the only athletes who were ever tested out of competition were the British. It meant that the governing bodies could point to negative results and say 'look we're clean' - but then along came Ben Johnson, Linford Christie and a host of other top names who wouldn't have been quite so top without taking something that had its origins in the laboratories of the old Soviet Bloc rather than Boots on the High Street.

Professional sport has a choice - a big fat moral choice that will define not only sport at the top but will trickle down to grass roots within a matter of months. Legalise and be damned or ban all drug cheats for life. At the start of this years Tour De France all the riders signed a pledge that stated if they were found guilty of any breaches of the competition rules they would forfeit a years salary - it was felt that would be sufficient incentive for the cheats to not prosper, it clearly wasn't.

Professional sport isn't like amateur sport. It's about winning, sometimes at all costs - just ask Marco Pantani, but that winning needs to be achieved within a code of conduct, of rules and regulations that people who want to aspire to greatness can follow without having to take drugs.

Today, like yesterday and the day before were sad days for sport, all sports.