Re:Tour De France 2007 Preview
I’m beginning to come round to your way of thinking on this Piper. What I think the article below misses are two things:
- The coverage is now on Sat.1 in Germany so the broadcasters gave the coverage to someone else
- Both those stations had funded T Mobile in the past and were heavily criticised in Germany for not being objective and consequently for misuse of public funds. That’s why they made the decision.
Don’t give up on the Tour yet
German broadcasters were wrong to suspending their coverage of the Tour following Patrick Sinkewitz’s failed doping test
William Fotheringham
July 20, 2007 3:09 PM
“Do you agree with our decision to pull out of covering the Tour?” the man with the camera and the microphone from German television asked me, among others, before Thursday’s stage started. I didn’t give the greatest of soundbites: “no, I don’t agree”.
I don’t believe that Germany’s public broadcasters did the right thing in suspending coverage of the Tour as a reaction to Patrick Sinkewitz’s positive test for testosterone. It is only a provisional move, until the B sample has been examined, but it is still an easy way out. In the most basic form, it means the broadcasters are asking for guarantees the Tour is clean. Given the events of the last nine years, that is simplistic.
Currently, you either accept cycling as it is or you don’t. But you don’t make that judgement on one case, and you don’t make it in the middle of the Tour de France. There are grounds for giving up on cycling, and there are grounds for being depressed about the Sinkewitz case, but they don’t lie in the mere fact that he was positive, more in the background.
It seems likely that the big losers will be T-Mobile: adidas have left them, Audi may follow, and the main sponsor is pondering its future as well. Keeping Sinkewitz on after last year’s massive clear-out now looks like a mistake, given that he had been a client of the “notorious” Dr Ferrari. My assumption, given what I know of the people now running the team, is that it was an honest mistake, but they may well end up being punished none the less.
If the Sinkewitz case is confirmed, it underlines the difficulty of changing mindsets. But how much difference does it make for a cyclist to be aware of how much is at stake? Awareness of the bigger picture is not something that comes naturally for many elite athletes: they live in a bubble, they are driven, they obsess about what the opposition is up to. In many cases, drug-takers don’t believe they are doing anything wrong, or that they will get caught. If they are going to dope, they are not going to be burdened by the consequences.
The “German TV question” comes back to the old conundrum: do you give up on cycling, or not? The answer is: we don’t give up on it, because to do so is a betrayal of the clean athletes and - in a wider sense - because you don’t believe people can change their ways. Call me a woolly liberal (I have written for the Guardian for nearly 20 years so perhaps it is justified) but I don’t have that jaundiced a view of humanity, yet. Give me another Tour or two, at the current rate of progression and I might be pretty yellow.
Which brings us seamlessly to Michael Rasmussen, he of the stick legs and “whereabouts issues” revealed on Thursday night. Provisos over the vexed nature of “whereabouts” aside, if the Danes are truly worried about whether “Chicken” has been on the run from the testers, they are right to drop him from the national team.
Safety first - an approach that T-Mobile would have done well to adopt with Sinkewitz. But that raises another issue: if the national federation has doubts about Rasmussen’s bona fides, where does that leave his professional team, Rabobank? And what should cycling fans think later in this Tour, when “Chicken” flies through the Pyrenees?
I’d refer you back to a previous blog on how to deal with it. Watch the cyclists race, admire the skill on the descents, marvel at the athleticism on the climbs, put your emotional energy behind the ones you believe are clean. Where it comes to the ones you don’t know about, be healthily sceptical. This little world isn’t going to change overnight.