When the Wheels Come Off a Sport

[ceejay]

This refers to cycling and follow-up with baseball. But is horse racing at risk? What if a Derby champ tested positive? (I'd say it'd be swept under the rug). Or BC champ/HOY? Or if it turned out that a track/circuit is racked by illegal drugs?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/we...w/13macur.html

TOMORROW, the American cyclist Floyd Landis, the would-be heir to Lance Armstrong, steps before an arbitration panel in California to rebut the charge that his come-from-behind victory last year in cycling’s most celebrated race was a fraud.

This couldn’t be where baseball is headed, could it?

As the two sports settle into their seasons, new, aggressive investigations are underway in both that could implicate dozens of star players and cyclists and raise questions about — if not shatter — the legitimacy of their accomplishments.

In cycling, more than 100 riders, including some of the sport’s luminaries, have been implicated by the Spanish police in a blood-doping investigation.

In baseball, federal prosecutors have begun to pursue new avenues of investigation after a former Mets batboy pleaded guilty last month to selling performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of major-league players. He is cooperating with authorities. In addition, a special commission set up by Major League Baseball to look into the sport’s drug problem has asked dozens of players to meet with its investigators and has sought medical records from at least two of the game’s recent top sluggers, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro.

Cycling appears to have had little choice. Since Landis tested positive for synthetic testosterone in July, races have been canceled and teams have folded, both for lack of sponsors; fans have stayed home or switched off their televisions (for one Belgian race this spring, the venerable Tour of Flanders, there was a 77 percent decline in the live audience, according to IFM, a sports research company in Germany); and television networks in the United States and Europe have sharply curtailed their coverage of the sport.

The Championship of Zurich which had endured for nearly a century, was canceled last month by Swiss organizers after doping scandals scared off sponsors. As for the sport’s bottom line, IFM calculates that cycling has plunged as a marketing investment this season.

“In every boardroom, if you talk about sponsorships for any big cycling race, they all discuss the doping problems,” Henri van der Aat, managing director of a sports consulting agency in Amsterdam, told The International Herald Tribune this week.

That reverence requires belief that the accomplishments are true — a faith that may have been lost in cycling, and is being tested in baseball.

and could be tested in horse racing.........