Cross post to @baseball and @Pro Cycling, from the excellent The Hardball Times:

♲ Dan Lependorf
What baseball must learn from Lance Armstrong
Words numerous enough to fill a mountain have been spent on the subject of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, but if there’s a sport that’s even worse off, it’s cycling. More than half of the top 10 finishers of the Tour de France in the past decade have either admitted to, tested positive for, or otherwise been officially sanctioned for doping. If you expand that list to include the cyclists who have been accused by other riders, named in reports, or caught with performance enhancing substances outside of races, the number rises close to three-quarters. It’s a dirty, dirty sport—and baseball should be paying close attention.

What I find most interesting about the recent developments in the Lance Armstrong fiasco isn’t the admission of guilt or the incredibly sophisticated methods cyclists have used to skirt around the rules, but the public reaction. The public should have reacted similarly to how they did when Barry Bonds was caught up in his own steroid mess, no? So why does it seem so much more widespread and so much more negative?

Let me be clear—Barry Bonds clearly received a harsh public treatment after his steroid allegations entered the mainstream. Arguments revolving around game purity have been tossed around for years. And this year, in his first year of eligibility, the greatest hitter of his generation (and his father’s generation, for that matter) received 36.2 percent of the vote, presumably all due to his shadowed history with performance-enhancing substances. I’m not arguing that the public has ignored his steroid use, by any means. But when the Bonds’ allegations were at a peak, he didn’t garner 24-hour news coverage with headlines ending in “-gate” in bold red letters. Why?

I’m convinced a significant portion of the difference is due to the public’s opinion of these two athletes before anything happened. Lance Armstrong was an incredibly popular national icon who reached levels of popularity usually reserved for Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks and Oscar-winning actors, not for athletes in a sport with a relatively low fanbase like road cycling. He was the United States’ gleaming pride. He beat cancer, for Christ’s sake. And most importantly of all, he was as outspoken of an advocate for stricter drug-testing measures in sports as there ever was. In such a dirty sport, he was a clean, shining beacon of integrity. What wasn’t to love?

Obviously, Bonds never enjoyed such popularity. He was incredibly talented all the same, but to call him “likeable” would be a bit of an exaggeration. The public never warmed up to him in quite the same way they usually look up to sport stars, and when steroid allegations piled up, he denied everything in a way that didn’t change very many opinions.

On the other hand, Armstrong took pride in being clean. He repeatedly insisted he was the lone clean voice in a filthy room, even going as far as taking legal action against those who claimed otherwise. Wouldn’t you? If you had won seven grueling races in clean, legitimate fashion, and people started questioning your cleanliness, wouldn’t you want to scream it from the rooftops? And when the allegations got louder and more frequent, it’s easy to see that the hypothetically-clean Lance had a natural reaction. He held his ground and screamed louder. In a sort of now-perverse fashion, Lance’s defiance in the face of the steroid allegations made one of the most untouchably great athletes of all time relatable.

And that’s why the public reaction to Armstrong was sharper and more negative than most anything that Bonds faced. The public can deal with a villain doing bad things. The relative indifference Alex Rodriguez faced when admitting steroid use can attest to that. But a sterling role model who betrayed everybody by engaging in the very same behavior than those he repeatedly decried? It’s not the actions, but the betrayal of trust. It’s the height of the fall.

It’s this hero worship that baseball needs to watch out for. If a large portion of baseball players are indeed doping, as people like Jose Canseco have claimed, baseball obviously has significant issues to sort out. Cycling’s reputation in the public eye is irreparably damaged not only from the breadth of its steroid problem, but because the sport had all of its eggs in one enormous gleaming basket. Baseball is still recovering from a similar situation with Mark McGwire and Bonds, but all of the forward progress of the last decade can come to a screeching halt in a hurry with every failed test.

It’s nice to think that we’re far enough away from the steroid era that the public’s trust is all the way back, but re-opening that wound is something baseball simply can’t afford.

Read more great baseball stuff at The Hardball Times.
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WTF?

The UCI refused to offer a minimum wage, but now they're offering equal prize money?

Is it just me, or is this a cunning ploy ("but they get the same prize money for less work!") to make it look like women are being treated fairly at a much lower cost than giving them a living wage?


♲ VeloNews.com
UCI OKs equal prize money for men, women at most world championships
AIGLE, Switzerland (VN) — The UCI Management Committee has approved a proposal to award equal prize money for men and women at all UCI world championships, beginning with the world cyclocross championships February 2-3 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The decision takes effect in January and applies to all cycling disciplines save the road team time trial, whose prize money is funded by a contribution from the UCI WorldTour’s reserve and solidarity fund.

UCI President Pat McQuaid welcomed the decision, saying no distinction should be made between the achievements of men and women.

“The Management Committee’s approval is a simple but very important step forward in our effort to guarantee a healthy and fair future for our sport,” McQuaid said.
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@Pro Cycling

So, after flat out refusing to rule on the Contador case, then appealing when they didn't get the result they wanted, which they were invited to deliver in the first place, and dragging the whole thing out for years, the UCI now want to rule on Armstrong.

Wonder why. It wouldn't have anything to do with that bribe, would it?


♲ VeloNews.com
USADA pushes back against UCI request for Armstrong jurisdiction
In a new turn in the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s case against seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, the agency is pushing back against an apparent move by the UCI to invoke jurisdiction in the investigation.

The New York Daily News reported on Friday that the UCI had requested that USADA hand over all documents related to the Armstrong investigation. A UCI letter dated July 13 was attached to a brief that USADA filed on Friday in U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas.

In that letter, UCI president Pat McQuaid informed USADA that, “The UCI wants that the whole case file with all the evidence is assessed by an independent panel who shall then decide if the respondents have a case to answer.”

USADA responded with its own letter, also attached to the August 3 brief, in which general counsel Bill Bock wrote that, “Many could legitimately contend that UCI’s involvement in the results management of the case would suffer from a structural concern sometimes referred to colloquially as ‘the fox guarding the henhouse.’

“In numerous instances the inability of a sports organization to effectively police doping within its sport has been noted.”

In the letter, Bock also wrote that the UCI had “adopt(ed) some of the arguments now being advanced by Mr. Armstrong’s lawyers and public relations consultants.”

A significant portion of the evidence cited by USADA in its June 12 charging letter against Armstrong and five others is understood to rely on blood values gathered during the Texan’s most recent comeback, which included third place in the 2009 Tour de France.

When contacted by VeloNews for comment on Friday, USADA chief Travis Tygart’s office responded with this statement:

“The USPS doping conspiracy was going on under the watch of UCI, so of course UCI and the participants in the conspiracy who cheated sport with dangerous performance enhancing drugs to win have a strong incentive to cover up what transpired. The participants in the conspiracy have lashed out in the press, gone to Congress and filed a lawsuit to avoid a public display of the evidence before neutral judges. Efforts to intimidate, scare or pressure us to conceal the truth will not stop us from doing the job we are mandated to do on behalf of clean athletes and the integrity of all sport. The participants of the USPS doping conspiracy made their decisions to use dangerous banned drugs to win and our job is to apply the rules whether someone is famous or anonymous and we will do that on behalf of the millions of people who demand clean sport despite these external pressures.”

Armstrong faces an August 13 deadline to respond to the USADA allegations. At that point, he can accept what could be up to a lifetime ban — the sanction handed three others in the case last month — or request arbitration, as his longtime team manager Johan Bruyneel has done.

On July 10, the Texan filed suit in the Austin District Court seeking to challenge USADA on the constitutionality of the agency’s sanctioning process.


@Pro Cycling

♲ Olympic Games
Cycling Road Men's Road Race - Final- London 2012 Olympic Games Highlights


Cycling Road Men's Road Race - Final- London 2012 Olympic Games Highlights

Cycling Road Men's Road Race - Gold Medal Alexandr Vinokurov, Kazakhstan, Silver Medal Rigoberto Uran Uran, Colombia, Bronze Medal Alexander Kristoff, Norway, Highlights from The Road Race Route at the London 2012 Olympic Games. -- 28 July 2012 Cycling is among the rare sports that have always featured on the Olympic programme. Road cycling, however, was not on the programme of the Paris 1900, St Louis 1904 or London 1908 Games, while track cycling wasn't in the programme of the Stockholm 1912 Games. The first road event in Olympic history took place in 1896 on the marathon route at the first Games of the modern era in Athens. The race started in Athens, headed towards Marathon, then returned to Athens, at the Phaliron velodrome. Olympic cycling was added to the women's programme in Los Angeles in 1984, with an individual road event. Find more about Road and Track Cycling at www.olympic.org/cycling-road and www.olympic.org/cycling-track

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@Pro Cycling