A brutal Tour de France will always create a temptation to dope, says Professor Simon Chadwick

Yeah, and while you're at it, why not reduce the marathon to 100m. That would be sure to eliminate any doping in athletics, right?

Don't buy this at all.

Doping is about winning not surviving.

Who was the big name rider who suggested that a tougher event would be the thing to stop doping. The argument was that in a hard event only a few riders would stand any chance and most wouldn't have any need to dope as it wouldn't make a difference. The point is as least as valid as the one in the article and it was spoken by someone who had experience of the event. It's impossible to go back to the early days of the Tour as roads are surfaced, bikes are so much more advanced as is training, technology and medicine yet in those days the stages were longer and harder. Riders coped then so why not now?
Rider health is up to them. If someone wants to grind their body into the ground that's their concern not some academics.
Surely if the anti doping system works then it wouldn't matter if riders tried to dope for hard races. They would be caught.

A couple of years ago, Gilbert said that if UCI were serious about anti-doping, they would have to reduce the difficulty of some races / stages, and reduce the number of racing-days of a rider in a season. Not sure if I totally agree with this - probably the most doped sporting event is the 100m sprint. So I agree with others - it is the competition (and money) that pushes riders to dope. And I'm sure PG wasn't clean in his amazing 2011 season (but he's still one of my fav riders!)

Useless article. It would have been useful to point out that TUEs are bad for riders - (1) it leads riders to forget about pacing themselves, because they assume they can overcome any illness with drugs of some sort (2) it suppresses symptoms enough to ride, while the root physical problems remain unsolved, and perhaps worsened (3) it can give riders unfair physical advantage.

The honorable professor throws a good gob of mud on Lars Boom - even if the mud slides off the wall it leaves a mark. A carefully chosen outside-of-group target.

Looking closer to home at something complete confirmable:
I longer have an exalted opinion of Froome's character after he took, legally with a TUE, steroids to win one of the classic races. And since he whined on twitter about not being able to have a private motor home on the tour. Just another short sighted champion trapped by his own success - hardly the anti-Lance we were waiting for.

Quince, what you are overlooking is that doping and cycling have always co existed, from the very earliest days.

So to say the temptation is new is wrong,

I am not condoning it, but human nature is what it is, a parallel, watch how motorists behave on the motorway when they can see a police car and when they can't. If people think they can get away with something then some people will go for it.

The piece seems to assert (very reasonably) that there are two driving factors that ecourage doping; those imposed by rivals (i.e. Competetivity), and those imposed by the demands of the race itself (i.e. Overall difficulty).

It also seems to (equally reasonably) assume that to remove competitively from a sporting event would be to undermine its entire purpose, and so does not argue that doping should be discouraged in this manner.

This leaves us with the argument that the TdF is too difficult by nature, which is combined with an assertion that the event is being made progressively savage - at cost to the riders - simply to please spectacle-hungry fans and sponsors.

It is this assertion, thought not unreasonable sounding, that I would like to see backed up with evidence.

Yes, this year's Tour is 3,400km. Yes, this is long. But the 1926 Tour was 5745km, over 17 stages rather than 21 (which averages 338km per day - over 100km longer than this year's longest stage). This was done on bikes that weighed over twice as much, and without dérailleurs. I even think it was illegal to slipstream, leaving the rider constantly at the mercy of the greatest force a cyclist needs to overcome.

Of course, I'm cherry picking a single counter-example, but I'm positive that if anyone were to compile a graph of 'Tour de France Difficulty' by various metrics, none would support the assertion that 'The Tour de France is becoming harder than ever, and to such a degree that it asks an unreasonable amount of its athletes'.

The main issue at this year's Tour appears to be the crashes, and no amount of doping can fix a broken collarbone or a smashed vertebrae. EVEN addressing this issue individually (thus, no longer discussing doping), all the crashes have happened on straights, with Martin's crash even occurring relatively slowly up a hill. Such scenarios are difficult to iron out of a bike race.

Yes, we need to be attentive to the needs of athletes in what is a gruelling sport, but please back up your assertions with something more substantial than 'general concern'. The information is all there.

If the difficulty of the race had anything to do with it I missed the point when I and thousands of others did a big amateur event in the Alpes which scaled 5,000m of climbing and 176km….I would bet that beyond the pros/VIPs aiming for a pro contract, most competitors were riding clean. The need to win is clearly the main driver.

When I was 9 my six year old cousin was caught pull money from the Monopoly bank…..it wasn't that it was a tough game, but merely that she sort an unfair advantage to win. She almost got away with it too.

Start line random testing
Publication of all TUEs

and ban tramadol to keep the number of crashes down.

Not sure why the professor felt the need to write his empty article really.

Blimey this article is a little naive. The testing is at best, rubbish. One race isn't going to get someone to dope. Getting away with it consistently and knowing others are and gaining an advantage is what is going to make riders dope.

Unfortunately even though cycling leads the sports world in doping it's pretty apparent that it falls well short.

Professor Absolutely No Idea....

hmmm..

Quote:

A brutal Tour de France will always create a temptation to dope, says Professor Simon Chadwick

Professor Simon Chadwick may be a professor; but is he a professor of any relivent discipline?

Quote:

Chair in Sport Business Strategy and Marketing at Coventry University Business School.

doesn't sound as though he is an expert in sports doping or psychology or anything which may give some professional insight into why some athletes turn to cheating?

I find the idea the cyclists picking them selves up from a crash, will turn to PEDs to get them through the following stage to be a little odd. The likes of Michael Matthews have been struggling to hold onto the back of the pelloton - why cheat just for that?

Of course, I'm not saying the PEDs are not out there, but the reasons for cheating are probbly different.

And I also do have to wonder at what pain killers some cyclists are using......

Yeah. It's not like the majority of those drugs are used to aid recovery. Don't be so stupid.

Good grief. Started reading but gave up. I take it Prof Chadwick knows:-
a) Nothing about the history of the Tour
b) Nothing about athletics.

As more sensible people have said before, repeatedly, athletes dope for a 10sec sprint. They dope to win, not to mitigate the difficulty. I wish people would stop opining on stuff they know absolutely sweet FA about.

TL;DR, but the title presents a completely wrong diagnosis.

It's not the difficulty of the race which creates a desire to dope. It's the rivalry itself and the desire to beat opponents, as well as the possibility of getting away with cheating.

No matter how easy a race would be, it would always be all about arriving at the finish line first. The level of difficulty is the same for all riders so no matter how difficult/easy the race, riders will always benefit from doping.

I'd even say that the tougher the race, the more other skills come into play, such as one's mental mindset and bike handling skills, which are not (or are just minimally) enhanced through doping.