Warning, this is very rambling even by my standards, but there's too many converging points to do as a series of posts without it being lost in the shuffle.
The sport is at an important crossroads. Chris Froome is just a participant in the game, but we are at a worrisome tipping point. The sport has been carefully balancing along a narrow beam between spectacle and trustworthiness for a long time, but one of the most important keys to the delicate balance was the understanding that anti-doping was, in fact, about catching cheats. It may have been selective in its focus, and it may have been open to certain abuses on all sides, but ultimately its aim was to catch cheats. It was the only system we had with which the integrity of the sport was maintained, for all of its flaws, and for that it was regarded as essential, no matter how ineffectual or arbitrary it may sometimes have seemed. After all - not everybody has the time nor the inclination to research the team doctors, not everybody has the time to peruse the UCI's sanctions pdfs, not everybody cares enough to study each rider's team history and find the patterns, and they needed something with which to understand at least superficially how they were supposed to trust what they saw.
Back in the 70s and 80s, professional wrestling was regulated by athletic commissions and treated as a real sport across the world. Companies and wrestlers would go to great lengths to ensure that the sordid business of rigging and falsehood that underpinned the industry was protected; one example was that Ted DiBiase was always furnished with a large roll of shiny new banknotes, because it was important that nobody could say that "The Million Dollar Man" didn't tip or was fumbling for small change. Wrestlers would protect the business at all costs, because it was vital to their earning potential that the public believed in what they were selling. Some organizations would even use a skilled wrestler with legitimate sports background to wrestle members of the crowd for additional money, like the old carnival days, to 'prove' the legitimacy of the sport. Wrestlers who imparted secrets or who broke the code, running the risk of revealing the fakery, would be ostracised and shunned. Sure, with the outlandish moves and characters there was already plenty to doubt, and plenty of people had implied or outright stated that the sport was rigged (to the extent that Groucho Marx was joking about it even in the 1950s), but it wasn't explicitly acknowledged.
In 1987, two prominent wrestlers were arrested for DUI, drinking and partying together - supposedly two mortal rivals, one good guy and one bad guy. Why would these men who, to the public's eye, couldn't stand one another and couldn't be in the same room without a fight breaking out, be partying together, unless something was amiss? It was the first of a series of blows to the credibility of professional wrestling, all of which culminated in Vince McMahon testifying to a State Senate that wrestling was not a legitimate sport, ostensibly to avoid some of the regulation required by the athletic commissions. This was not acknowledged on-screen until several years later, but the rumours spread fast and in the end it was an inevitability that it would become common knowledge. But unlike with, say, a magician, where you know it's a trick but you don't know how it's done, wrestling laid all of its falsehoods out there for everybody to see. It was transparent in its fakeness. And what happened? Well, at first, not a great deal, but over time wrestling as it had been died almost completely; shorn of any belief in the legitimacy of either the good or the bad guys, fans ceased to cheer for the heroes and boo the villains, and instead would cheer for who entertained them, regardless of whether they ostensibly portrayed positive or negative characters. Many, shorn of any reason to believe what was presented, felt betrayed and stopped watching; others, with no longer a reason to care who won or lost, would simply wish for the spectacle to entertain them and would stop watching once no longer entertained.
A lot of professional sport is, however, now at that difficult crossroads that wrestling found itself in the late 1980s. Obviously the underlying falsehood is different and there isn't going to be a Vince McMahon moment; for the most part legitimate sport is not predetermined, at least not in the same way as professional wrestling (plenty of rigged competitions out there of course), but over the last few years, the public has become a lot more keenly aware of 'what lies beneath', shall we say. Fans are far more clued up now as to backroom deals, doping scandals, nepotism and so on, than they were before the Information Age. Controlling the narrative is much more difficult now because while you can always lead the mainstream media, with journalists keen to retain a level of access and with agendas and remits to fulfil, maintaining a level of control over the much less predictable and less malleable social media is much more difficult. Cycling is one of the most directly affected sports, because the lid has been off about doping in cycling many times before. Cycling has had its moments like that 1987 arrest where the extent of 'what lies beneath' has been laid bare for fans to see - the Festina Affair and Operación Puerto, to name but two. Riders who've broken the code - in wrestling parlance, it is called kayfabe, whereas in cycling the mafia word, omertà, or "silence", is preferred - are pressured to keep their mouths shut, bullied and hounded within the péloton, an unfortunate outcome of it being a pack sport. You can be blackballed by the péloton, or blackballed by the authorities. This can be those who expressly and publicly draw attention to doping, such as Christophe Bassons or Filippo Simeoni, those who themselves were dopers but who talked to the authorities thus endangering others, like Emanuele Sella, or even just those who did nothing of the sort but who were busted in such a way as to embarrass the sport or affect its global image, and therefore their continued success is undesirable, such as Michael Rasmussen. Cyclists doping has been common knowledge enough for sports whose own houses are far from in order to laugh at it - witness the mockery on Punto Pelota that led to Óscar Pereiro flying off the rails, for example.
We've long been at the stage where the default reaction to a great ride is not to applaud the chutzpah of the rider but to question what made it possible, but now we're at a stage where it's common enough knowledge that it's not even possible to suspend one's disbelief. I've talked about the line we draw between where we are willing to suspend our disbelief and where we aren't before - for the record, that particular discussion was where I drew the line above Ezequiel Mosquera but below Cândido Barbosa, whose mountain exploits for two weeks a year as an 80kg sprinter were simply unpalatable even in my more naïve times. But perhaps now we've reached that post-kayfabe point that wrestling reached, where many fans have simply let go of any pretence to believing in what they're seeing, and instead have come to the conclusion that they should just cheer for who entertains them and boo who doesn't, regardless of whether their achievements are objectively believable or not. And for those fans who've decided that enough scandals and enough knowledge of 'what lies beneath' has become available to them that they simply do not trust any of the athletes they see, and simply therefore are only interested in the sport for its entertainment value.
It's only here that Chris Froome really gets involved, and in large part his involvement is, much as Christophe Proudhomme may not like to hear this seeing as he objects to Froome's current presence at the Tour, very much the unintended consequence of ASO's actions a decade ago. After the lid was lifted on the Festina Affair, and especially after reigning Giro and Tour champion Marco Pantani was unceremoniously removed from the Giro close to the end, ostensibly on health grounds as that was the only way they could test for many of the substances in use at the time, the 1999 Tour was branded the "Tour of Redemption", to try to mitigate the obvious negative impact on the race's appeal after the previous year's doping scandals; it was won of course by Lance Armstrong, who over the years became a very profitable cash cow in that lucrative US market. After his retirement, a stagnation of that market, along with negative impacts of consecutive doping scandals in other markets, most significantly the German market, which was teetering on the brink after Operación Puerto, and leapt headlong into the abyss following the Rasmussen, Vinokourov, Kashechkin and Sinkewitz scandals in 2007, meant that the sport was perhaps not hitting the viewership/sponsor profitability targets intended, but either way, it meant that the return of Lance Armstrong in 2009 was pretty much accepted at any terms necessary by the race organisers. RCS voluntarily removed the Giro invite for wildcard team Ceramica Flaminia-Bossini Docce even though they had the current Italian national champion, because Lance wouldn't ride if Filippo Simeoni did. ASO unleashed a tailored Tour route to ensure Armstrong would stay in contention until very deep into the race, to maintain high audience figures thanks to the Armstrong effect.
But the most important impact of Armstrong's return was the removal of AFLD from testing at the Tour, and - allegedly pressured by Nicolas Sarkozy - the removal of Pierre Bordry from his position there. AFLD's work on the anti-doping front was the driving force behind a lot of progress from 2006-2009; they were the ones that kept the CERA test fully secret until suddenly unleashing a flurry of positives, seeing as the drug both had a long half-life and was thought by the péloton to be safe from detection. But throwing a polka dot jersey wearer out of the race during the event, and a GC podium and polka dot jersey winner being disqualified after the event, as well as having to reclassify no fewer than four stages, didn't sit well with the attempts to rejuvenate the event, and so revoking AFLD's licence for the race was of course a small price to pay for the improvement in that lucrative American audience. Similar manipulation of the target audience is also behind other ASO decisions in recent times, of course - do we think that the series of TT-biased courses culminating in the 2012 Tour de France, perfectly timed to cash in on a UK home Olympics with a first ever British Grand Tour win, was pure coincidence? Or the attempts to bring the German crowd back into the fold with a Tour start, just before an ASO-organised relaunch of the Deutschland Tour takes place? At the end of the day, ASO is a business, and they were happy to ride the Team Sky gravy train while it was profitable. Chris Froome has won 16 stage races at the UCI level since the start of 2012; 10 of these have been in explicitly ASO-organised races (Dauphiné, Oman, Tour de France, Critérium International), and a further three have been in closely ASO-affiliated races (Romandie, Vuelta a España); only the 2015 Ruta del Sol, 2016 Herald Sun Tour and 2018 Giro d'Italia have been away from the watchful eyes of Proudhomme.
So what went wrong for Christian? After all, he was happy to have Froome winning his race even when the fans, some of whom were greatly upset at this perceived doper getting perceived preferential treatment, and/or lording it over the péloton with an air of undeserved arrogance in his proclamations of his own cleanliness, but some of whom, like the wrestling fans above, had almost ceased to care about cheering for heroes or villains, and simply wanted to be entertained, and so the fans' absolute rejection of Froome as a champion for any and all of these reasons became a more compelling story than the actual race. But with an actual positive test behind him - which until this week was legitimately to be regarded as such, before any pedantry - his presence at the forefront of the race was no longer something that was beneficial to ASO. His reputation was damaged, he was no longer presentable as the clean face of the current crop, taking over a year after the Reasoned Decision just as Lance had taken over a year after Festina. The fans' rejection of him ceased to be a compelling story for Proudhomme.
But now, Sky are dangerous for the delicate balancing act that is cycling's attempt at retaining some kind of morality. In part because of their Manchester City-esque budgetary superiority enabling them to build it, and in part because of some very friendly ASO-led parcours (it's no coincidence that of stage races won by the team in black in the last eight years, nearly half are in the small handful organised by the Amaury group) helping them build a pre-eminent position in some of the biggest races out there, they have grown to a position of immense prominence in the sport and are now in the position that it seems they feel they can get away with anything; they simultaneously treat themselves as the morality police of the sport whilst simultaneously flaunting their unwillingness to do anything that imposes any moral obligations on themselves - declining to join MPCC because they have their own "stronger" internal checks which enable them to continue to keep riders on the road while under investigation, for example, or only sanctioning riders for racially abusing fellow professionals after they've extracted maximum benefit from them in the race they're in, and ensuring that they place his internal suspension through his scheduled rest period. And then they flaunt their superiority by ruling races with an iron fist, confident in their beliefs that they are untouchable.
Because that's what this decision inevitably sets into the minds of the fans. That Sky are untouchable by the hands of anti-doping despite the myriad stories that have hit the presses, that there can be no Vince McMahon moment where the game is up despite practically every finger pointing at them. That they're simply brazen in their cheating because they know they're too powerful for whatever legitimate anti-doping fight there remains. That the jiffy bag investigation went away because not enough evidence could be gathered, but throughout the process Sky were obstructive and evasive, with various excuses presented as to why that evidence was not available but no satisfactory answers to why that was. And so now we have a decision which has been successfully filibustered for ten months while it was no impediment to Froome riding, suddenly become available less than 24 hours after his availability to do whatever the hell he wants is affected. How can they act surprised if the fans don't want to see it anymore?
Like it or not, the Froome decision and its implications are a huge blow to clean competition in any sport. Regardless of your position on Froome himself, placing the onus back onto the anti-doping authorities to prove anything when there are already some absurdly generous limits designed to avoid false positives (remember Levi's 133% off-score?) and away from the athletes, only serves to exacerbate the problem which is that athletes play a lot in the grey areas of what they can get away with without tripping the anti-doping legislation. What this decision does is make the grey area roughly the size of Jupiter, so long as you have adequate funding to challenge the test. It's also why André Cardoso's announcement that he's abandoning his appeal came out this week, as he is able to provide a perfect juxtaposition to Chris Froome - the big difference being that he tested positive for something which is banned at all times, rather than a controlled substance, so continuing to ride during the appeal process would have been much more of an issue.
Either way, the reaction of fans to Chris Froome at the Tour presentation was only to be expected. It's not even especially to do with him personally; it's to do with everything that he, and his team, represents: big business, and faceless, emotionless corporate megaliths, reducing everything to power numbers and soundbites, trampling all over the little guy and rubbing it in their face while they do it. Cardoso has posited himself in that role, a counterpoint to Froome - an everyman trying to get by as a worker ant, whose B sample was inconclusive but prevented from fighting for perceived justice because he lacks the bank balance that Sky have. Whether he belongs in that role or not is a completely separate question, but you can see why the decision is controversial and why Froome's presence is therefore an unwelcome distraction.
However, while I may not want to see Chris Froome at the Tour any more than him, I have no sympathy for Christian Proudhomme. He has reaped what he has sown.
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