The Astana Inevitability

Recently, several Kazakh riders on Astana and “Astana 2” (Nibali’s words) have tested positive. Disappointing, yes. Surprising? Yes, until I thought about it.

Again, a brief (and selective) history of the last 2 decades of cycling. In July 1998, the Festina Affair caught international headlines, when team soigneur Willy Voet was caught with a supply of drugs plentiful enough to dope each rider several times over, for each day of the Tour de France. The French criminalized performance enhancing drug (PED) taking, and we’ve heard only scattered and isolated doping cases out of France since (the highest-profile case I can recall recently was Yoann Offredo, who forgot to fill in his whereabouts forms). 2006 marked the next big scandal, with Operacion Puerto in Spain. Next up is 2007, and the Michael Rasmussen and Rabobank saga, which took until 2010 to fully eke out. Then, in 2008, Schumacher, Kohl and Rebellin from the German Gerolsteiner team were found to have EPO-CERA in their systems. 2012 was the year that the Russian Katusha team were denied a WorldTour place on “ethical” grounds. One feels that Denis Galimzyanov’s positive certainly had an impact on this. In May 2013, the Italian team Vini Fantini had two positives and were excluded from the Giro. However, as in incredibly general rule, we've heard fewer and fewer positives coming from these countries after these incidents.

Richard Virenque is among the Festina riders answering tricky questions in 1998

Image: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01465/Richard_Virenque_1465136i.jpg

So, viewing these incidents in a geographic sense of the continental mainland; I've ordered them as starting in France, in the West of Europe, heading to Spain, Denmark and Holland, Germany, Russia, and Italy. In other words, the doping scandals are heading east. The next major stop in cycling on that tour was going to be Kazakhstan. Hopefully, this Astana affair will draw a line under Kazakh riders, and this will be the last doping controversy that we hear from them.

Maxim Iglinskiy winning Liege-Bastogne-Liege

Image: http://cdn.mos.bikeradar.com/images/news/2012/04/22/1335127630093-1ntsllx61u13s-700-80.jpg

Which leaves everything in a happy place, right? Erm, maybe not. If this trend continues, we still have to work through scandals in the Middle East and Asia. I hope I’m wrong, but based on an article written by Andrew Christie-Johnson last year, and a first-hand account suggest that teams can sidestep doping controls, or otherwise still manipulate them. This probably has a lot more freedom in the lower continental ranks than the elite echelon. But when the professionalism of the testers catches up with the riders, and if the market in Asia explodes with professional teams; we might not be out of the woods for doping scandals for years to come.

I just hope I’m wrong.