Re: Doping - an irregular verb
I'd already seen that story when I typed my reply. But there's a material difference, even if it turns out Team Sky had managed to hide a doping culture. Or even British Cycling. Nobody's failed any tests, and they've been quite well tested as they've been winning a lot.
The stats from cycling in general though suggest that doping is vastly reduced. Or at least road cycling - I've not read about track cycling. But in the tours leaders now regularly have off days. But also performance declines on days when they do multiple Cat 1 or harder climbs - and unlike in the Armstrong era where the performance would be similar on each, now the athletes are getting slower on the later ones. EPO turns out to be really good, if it doesn't kill you. Which would make systematic Sky doping much more likely to stand out - rather than what actually looks to have happened - which is a team that have concentrated (and spent very heavily) on winning the Tour de France. And been modestly successful elsewhere, compared to teams like QuickStep, Jumbo-Visma and Sunweb.
Doping is a global sporting problem. Some sports care more than others. I'm still waiting for big scandals in rugby for example. But Russia's state-backed systematic doping, backed by their intelligence services is a very rare beast. I've not read up on what doping is like in China since the scandals of 15-20 years ago, because they're not strong in the sports I'm interested in - but even at their height they weren't using state propoganda to try to rubbish everyone else or so desperate as to employ their intelligence services in pursuit of a bit of sporting glory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
