Ask Tour de France organisers about the period 1999-2005 and the reaction will register somewhere between moral indignation and whimpering self pity on the Brett Kavanaugh how-dare-you-ask-me-about-that-o-meter. These were the Armstrong years, an unprecedented era of dominance in the self-styled hardest sporting event on the planet, when a cycling champion transcended his sport to become a cultural icon and an inspiration to millions. It transpired, as we all know, that Armstrong was as drugged up as Bayer's chief lab rat. As his legs whirred in a blur of cadence and chemicals over sinuous Alpine passes his veins had coursed with EPO, the 90's/00's version of marginal gains. A cancer survivor turned sporting great, at his peak, such was his status, that when his downfall came it felt to many like their granny had been burgled by Gandhi or defrauded by Nelson Mandela. He'd stolen hope, so his doping was viewed as an unforgivable moral breach rather than in the more forgiving terms extended to his competitors.

And therein lies the point; Armstrong was a product of a prevailing cycling culture, rather than a rogue individual, the latest in a long line of compromised champions, rather than an anomalous outlier. He may have been a superstar, but first and foremost he was a cyclist. Cycling and doping are like ageless lovers lazily strolling down an endless beach. Jacques Anquetil's plea of "leave me in peace, everybody takes dope" encapsulates the ethos of omerta passed down from Merckx to Kelly, Coppi to Ullrich, from the innocence of swigging bottles of brandy to the "innocence" of Bradley Wiggins' TUEs. Ultimately, Anquetil's sentiments could serve as an epitaph for the sport and maybe just maybe for all sport.

For while cycling is the sport most closely associated with doping it is by no means unique in trying to come to terms with the issue. In so doing individual sports need to ask difficult questions not only of themselves but also of their heroes. Heroes like Carl Lewis. Like Armstrong, for years Lewis vehemently protested that his success owed nothing to chemical enhancement, like Armstrong he was lying. In the run up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Lewis tested positive on three separate occasions for banned stimulants, results which should have seen him excluded from competing at the games. But this was the man who had emulated Jesse Owens, so of course he ran. Indeed, he emerged from the steroid pageantry of the 100m with a burnished image; a relatable Frankenstein when juxtaposed with the grotesque Spitting Image style parody of athleticism that was Ben Johnson. Somewhat ironically, Lewis' triumph was in being an also-ran; placing second in the "dirtiest race in history" cast him as the victim, as a paragon of the Olympic spirit, as clean. Years later when his violation was exposed by an embittered ex-director of the United States Olympic Committee, Lewis' position on drug use conveniently flipped from holier-than-thou self righteousness to one he himself summed up as "who cares?". Funny, when Ben Johnson left him trailing in his wake, I'll tell you who cared, Carl Lewis cared.

Results in cycling and athletics have long been greeted with a degree of incredulity. You'd like to believe that Mo Farah is a genetic freak or Chris Froome the embodiment of a new "drug free" generation, but a nagging doubt somehow worms its way into your mind. Like jilted lovers our hearts have been broken too many times by their predecessors to be seduced again. However, if one sport can still make us swipe right despite its flaws, it's football.

Pep Guardiola is feted as the architect of the modern game, his teams, in combining the existential humanity of artistic self expression with the fatalism of carefully coded algorithms, create an almost cyborg like vision of football, more befitting the fantasy of a Sci-fi star-scape than a grassy field. Guardiola is a magician, so what secrets is he hiding?

During a 2012 interview on Irish radio, Graham Hunter, a respected journalist specialising in Spanish football, claimed that Xavi, the fulcrum of Pep's fabled Barcelona side, was treated for a chronic condition using human growth hormone (HGH). Hunter went further, casually elaborating that the use of HGH was common practice at Barcelona and was regularly administered to combat muscle strains and fatigue. Ever wonder how they play 70 games a season without tiring? On the cusp of an uncomfortable sensation, the well connected Hunter "mysteriously" and abruptly retracted his comments. Now why would a journalist categorically state one thing one minute before apologising about it the next?

Perhaps, Mr Hunter, like Hillary Clinton, suffers from "mis-speaking", or perhaps he recalled Barcelona's somewhat litigious response to previous accusations of doping. Yes, it may very well be that a little Catalan birdie reminded him of the case of Stephane Mandard. Mandard was a journalist at French paper Le Monde, who claimed that Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes, the principal player in the infamous Operacion Puerto doping scandal, showed him the medical records of players from, among other teams, Barcelona. In response, Barcelona immediately sued Le Monde. Indeed the club was vindicated by the final judgement which condemned the paper for using "false and unverified facts". For their transgression Le Monde was ordered to pay €15,000; conveniently just about enough to make anyone, Graham Hunter included, think twice about making similar accusations in the future.

Funnily, all the ethical posturing in the courtroom didn't prevent Barcelona from working with Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral who had previously worked for US Postal, the former cycling team of you know who, the Lord Voldemort of sport, Lance Armstrong. Now, I know what you're thinking, surely not the same Garcia del Moral who several of Armstrong's erstwhile teammates had witnessed administering HGH injections? Well, you're in for a surprise, or maybe not, it's the very same Garcia del Moral. So, that's the same doctor and the same drug, but since it's football instead of cycling, FC Barcelona instead of US Postal, Lionel Messi instead of Lance Amrstrong, it's somehow not the same.

Fast forward to Pep's current post at Manchester City and again drugs enter the picture. In 2017, Manchester City were fined £35,000 for breaching the FA's "whereabouts" rules. The club, while lamenting the difficulty of complying with the regulations, on a budget of only billions let's remember, attributed the failure to "administrative errors". Never one to miss an opportunity for virtue signalling, the club's Alastair Campbell clones, quickly contrived to invent the role of "whereabouts administrator" and hence reframe a potentially damaging narrative as the second coming of Nixon's "war on drugs". Attention successfully diverted, few misgivings about the paltry fine of £35,000 were raised, few questions about performance enhancement asked, and few comparisons to other sports, where a 2 year ban was the equivalent punishment, were made. But again, that's other sports, not football. They've got a "whereabouts administrator" what more do you want?

Perhaps they also lacked "whereabouts administrators" in ancient Greece. It seems, Aristotle, Plato, Sopholces et al were too busy creating the modern world to concentrate on a doping epidemic, which even then was sullying the Olympic ideal. To win the favour of the Gods, desperate athletes would gorge themselves on testosterone rich sheep testicles or chug down "wine potions" with the gusto of a certain nominee for the US supreme court. The adoption of such methods marked athletes out as adherents of the Hippocratic School of Medicine and hence placed them at the vanguard of practical expressions of philosophy in sport. In other words it marked the rejection of earlier supernatural beliefs founded on superstition for a more rigourous approach based on scientific discipline. Despite justifications so hifalutin as to make Man City's HR department blush, a Grecian precursor to WADA did attempt to police the use of performance enhancing substances. Responses to infractions were punitive; offending athletes were banned from the games and suffered the ignominy of having their names engraved on statues.

Given the intertwined histories of drug abuse and competitive sport, have we reached a point where we can talk as much of a doping instinct as a sporting one? Honestly, I don't know; but we can certainly talk of a doping dilemma. A quandary that divides winning and losing as widely as it does yes from no. A binary life choice from which there is no going back. While for athletes the choice is between doping or, as Durian Rider would say, staying "full natty", fans face a much starker dilemma which pits nihilism against belief. To quote Robert Frost, we are left to mull over whether, upon reaching his "two roads diverging in a yellow wood", Armstrong took the "road less traveled by". We already know that "it made all the difference".

Cycling / armstrong

The Armstrong Dilemma

The Armstrong Dilemma

The Armstrong Dilemma

24th August 2012

24th August 2012

24th August 2012