Olympic Cycling in Question

Filed in archive Biking on August 2, 2007

It's no secret the organizers of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics haven taken drastic efforts to ensure the games are completed with a hitch. Now, due to ongoing doping scandals, Olympic officials are questioning whether cycling has a place at the games.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on Friday rejected the idea of banishing the sport. Others on the 115-member Olympic committee are growing impatient with the incessant doping headlines cycling is generating.

"If cycling doesn't resolve this problem, I'd go as far as saying it should be excluded from the Olympics," Swiss IOC member Rene Fasel told The Associated Press. "Just tell them 'no more.' It's discrediting all those who are honest and clean. The heads of cycling need to know that if they don't clean up the sport, and really clean it up, then it's goodbye."

The doping crisis in cycling culminated at this year's Tour de France, the sport's showcase event that ends Sunday. The flash point came with the expulsion this week of race leader Michael Rasmussen, accused of lying about his whereabouts to evade doping controls.

Last year's winner, Floyd Landis, couldn't defend his crown because of doping charges hanging over him. Two other riders tested positive for doping at this Tour, including star Alexandre Vinokourov, sent home with his team.

"I have only one vote but I know there are others who share my point of view: Clean up your sport and come back then. We have to apply some pressure," said Fasel, president of the International ice hockey Federation and chairman of the coordination commission for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.

The AP reached 12 IOC members in Europe and Africa on Friday. A small number said cycling's Olympic status could be at risk; others were strongly in support of keeping the sport. But IOC member Dick Pound warned that could change if the sport's drug woes persist.

"If cycling doesn't take the steps necessary to bring this under control then I think the concern of some of the members would be that the perception of cycling will spread to other sports, and that's overall bad for the Olympic movement," said Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

"I'm not one of the ones who said you should cancel the Tour de France, throw out the entire the sport, because of this sort of thing," he said, adding that if cycling fails to clean house soon, "that kind of talk will increase."

Anita DeFrantz, an IOC member from the United States, says it would be wrong to ban the sport from the Olympics. She said team managers and doctors who supply the illegal drugs are the problem.

"The sport itself is not offensive," DeFrantz told the AP. "It's the people who break the rules and harm the athletes and the dignity of the sport. They're the ones who have to be gone."

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