Column: Cycling is cleaning up its act

By Larry Fleming

Let’s face it, professional cycling has had its share of run-ins with the drug czars.

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is referred to as the world’s most-tested athlete and reportedly has never failed a drug test. Yet, he’s been the target of Tour de France and French media outlets ever since he started winning the world’s top cycling event.

Last year’s Tour de France winner, Floyd Landis, is currently embroiled in a battle to save his cycling career. Landis has been under scrutiny since his remarkable Stage 17 last year.

Like Armstrong, Landis has vehemently defended his innocence after a French laboratory found irregularities in his backup urine samples from the 2006 race. Landis was later kicked off his team and the team eventually disbanded.

He faces a May 14 aribtration hearing and if he is not cleared would face a two-year ban and become the first cyclist in Tour de France history to lose his title.

When riders in Stage 5 of the Tour de Georgia left Dalton on Friday morning headed for Brasstown Bald Mountain 107 miles away, Tyler Hamilton of the Tinkoff Credit Systems team was competing in his first race since a two-year ban by the United States Anti-Doping Association (USADA) was lifted in September in 2006.

All along, Hamilton has maintained his innocence.

A team full of young, promising riders — Team Slipstream — was the first to launch a voluntary drug-testing program, in association with the Agency for Sporting Ethics (ASE). All 23 Slipstream riders, including the eight entered in the Tour de Georgia, have been tested at least once a week since the team’s training camp in January.

“None of us was against the testing program,” said Slipstream rider Craig Lewis. “We’re happy to do it.”

When player unions in other major sports fight testing at every turn, it’s refreshing to see Slipstream riders readily agree with this aggressive plan.

“Actually, it’s kind of sad we have to do this at all,” Lewis said, just minutes before the riders gathered for the stage start. “Sad because we’re doing it to prove our innocence.”

Lewis, a 22-year-old rider out of Greenville, S.C., still believes Slipstream’s drug-testing procedures are a good thing.

“It’s definitely a great step,” he said. “I’ve personally never seen anybody use drugs, and I don’t really know what’s out there. But more and more teams are doing it. It’s never going to be a perfect world and there’s always some bad out there.”

CSC and T-Mobile teams have joined Slipstream’s lead and are also going through the voluntary ASE program.

Jonathan Vaughters, Slipstream’s team director, says the drug testing is invaluable but not all that easy to pull off. He doesn’t believe the other professional cycling teams are being reluctant about joining the program either.

“It’s very difficult to do,” Vaughters said, standing just outside the team bus. “It’s very cutting edge technology. It’s very expensive. It costs us almost $400,000 per year to do this. And the logistics involved are incredible.”

Whether the Slipstream team is racing in Rome or Dalton or Barcelona, Spain, Vaughters said, the riders are going to get their once-weekly tests. Vaughters has to figure out how to handle the collections, verify the rider’s identity and sometimes a lab representative must fly to where the team is training or competing, pick up the samples, get back on a plane and get them back to the lab.

Vaughters, whose grandfather lives in Dawsonville, the heart of stock car racing, decided to make a commitment to the young riders on his team. Slipstream began as a team full of 17- to 19-year-old kids and Vaughters felt he had an obligation to their parents to make sure they were safe in his care.

“I’m not going to take a kid right out of high school and tell him and his parents that I’m going to develop him into a professional rider so he can take drugs,” Vaughters said. “That’s ridiculous. Basically, a lot of the scandals from last year put a fire under my butt and I decided to go ahead and do this ASE program.”

Good for Slipstream.

I wonder if Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League are listening.

They should.

“It’s certainly worth doing,” Lewis said.

Amen.