Are the pundits defending dopers actually delusional enough to believe they’re clean or are they being paid off? A performance like this is so obviously glowing it’s embarrassing to admit you’re that naive.
I think it's the same song and dance as ever : It's very hard (long and arduous) to prove and corroborate doping allegations and probably beyond the means of pundits. So why ruin a good thing, rock the boat and put your career in jeopardy over it ?
I used the term "kayfabe" from wrestling earlier. It's not exactly a novel analogy, I think many (here notably) spent the late 90 and early aughts witnessing a neverending meltdown met by "it's still real to me, dammit !" from many a fan. To a certain extent all pro sports are performative in the same sense wrestling (of the American variety) is.
I've taken an interest in pro boxing recently and it's a very good case of a sport that dropped all the pretenses of being anything other than show business. There's no league, 4 organisations at least crowning separate "world champions" in a dozen+ weight categories, fighters are carefully curated on their way to becoming contenders. The main goal for promoters is to stage events that will make good ratings or sell PPVs and that often means that the best don't fight the best because you don't want to ruin the commercial potential of a top fighter by adding loss to his record. And of course a long history of corruption and organised crime ties. Not to mention the grueling cost a lot of athletes pay because of how destructive it is. Star fighters can cash in 8 figures purses but 99% of pros will not see those prizes.
Most other sports will put a more respectable facade & enforce a supposedly more equal system but ultimately you find those tendencies everywhere.
With years passing, as I said, I grew numb at the whole ordeal. I follow sports casually now and like most people, I enjoy a good show. I'm not ignorant at the cost of it or the unsavoury parts (from capital concentration to broken lives through sportwashing) but heh... What can you do ?
I came to the conclusion doping in cycling (and sports in general) is a systemic issue that you can't fix with current means or even with a few large serious efforts every couple decades. I'm not certain anymore, even on an abstract level, you can fix it... Though I would still like to think we could fix it or guarantee a more even playing field.
Being cynical there's some truth to the idea that continued scandals or the perpetuation of the post Festina / Armstrong mood would probably kill pro cycling mid term... and that it would be "unfair" because a lot of other disciplines were never held to the same standard (despite track & field, football and tennis getting
some ripple aftershocks of Balco, Puerto, etc).
In short, I believe you'd need to basically completely reinvent the incentive structure of pro sports (in the complete opposite way of the current natural slope) and have some global authorities being really dedicated in monitoring it... And even that I'm unsure because the more stringent the anti-doping regulation is, the more specialized, arcane, isolated and sophisticated the sport bubble gets. You need a full medical staff to make sure athletes don't use a bunch of common medications that are also on banned substances lists (to use a recent example in cycling and baseball).
Anyhow, don't know where I'm going with this.
The masquerade will carry on until the next breaking point for another cycle. If Vingo's otherworldly performances are illegally enhanced, I hope the peloton will at least have the common sense to tell Jumbo to scale it back a notch to keep the illusion going. That's pretty rotten (inefficient & naive) to rely on the omerta but that's honestly how low my expectations are.
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