The Germans get it. By suspending coverage of the TdF as a result of Sinkewitz's positive, they ratchet up the pressure on the organizers to stop testing altogether. For some reason, professional cycling is the only major sport that insists upon eating itself -- the organizers suspend riders based upon innuendo and suspicion with no burden of proof; and successful riders who are not proven to have doped are nonetheless blanketed with suspicion solely for the affront of winning. Fans can do that -- it's their right. But when the organizers and fellow competitors do it out of spite or favoritism, it leads to the state of the sport today. The conventional wisdom is that doping exists in every major professional sport, yet cycling is considered the "dirtiest". Why? Because the people inside the sport have decided to use the spectre of doping as a weapon. Proof is secondary. Strike that -- proof is irrelevant.
So we all know that currently, drug testing is a sham. The results are arbitrary. It doesn't identify dopers --- it identifies the unlucky. By suspending television coverage in one of the more important markets for professional cycling, German television is sending an ironic message to the sport. I'm sure the intent is to express disapproval of an enterprise where the competitors dope, yet there seems to be no call for a suspension of Bundesliga games as of yet. What -- the soccer players are clean? Please.
The problem is that the organizers of professional cycling seem to take glee in dragging the sport through the mud, and the Germans, thankfully, are tired of it. The message sent by the Germans is not that we don't want to televise a sport full of dopers -- it's that we don't want to televise a sport that has made doping its cause celebre.
As Clerc noted in his interviews yesterday, German television is actually leaning on cycling organizers to stop testing, or at least find ways to suppress positive results so that the telecasts can be about cycling instead of chemistry lessons.
As I've said before, in a perfect world I'd be dead set against doping. In the world we live in, however, where drug testing is a meaningless and arbitrary exercise, I say let them all shoot up in their trailers and let the focus of the sport be on the race. That's not what the Germans wanted to say yesterday, but that's the message that Clerc heard, and I hope he heeds it.
For chrissake -- "Better Living Through Chemistry" was coined by a company founded by a Frenchman over 200 years ago. Live and let dope.