Ludvig Anton Wacker, a 21-year-old Dane with Sunweb's dev squad, has quit the sport and in going has taken a swipe at cycling's culture of chemical assistance:
Michael Barry at that time wrote of gateway drugs, wrote of starting out on multivitamins and ending up on EPO, his words echoing comments made a generation earlier by the likes of Laurent Fignon, Paul Kimmage and Allan Peiper. From Tom Simpson to Bradley Wiggins the sport has a long history of riders who start out criticising the doping of others and end up talking of the need for medical care. Once the gate is open, many find it difficult to resist going through.
The extent of cycling's culture of chemical assistance, the extent to which cycling is a pharmacy on wheels, was exposed in the noughties when Le Journal du Dimanche revealed that 11 non-French teams starting 2004's Tour had requested permission from the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments to import medicines which had no obvious application within cycling. The medical manifest of one team at the 2000 Tour listed 126 different products. It contained 684 individual packages which were calculated to contain 7,422 individual doses. The 2001 manifest for the same team covered 119 different products, made up of 790 packages containing a total of 8,334 individual doses. "These are not racers," the judge at the Festina trial is reported to have said, "they are cycling test tubes."
None of this is new. We all know of Henri Pélissier's dynamite comment from 1924. People have been talking about the use and abuse of stimulants in the sport since forever. Researching the history of the Hour record I came across this comment from William Rowe, the last man to set an Hour record on a Penny-Farthing, in 1886:
The culture of chemical assistance is not restricted to cycling, sport is just holding up a mirror to society. Add to that we also have the problem that part of the sport is funded by those offering magic elixirs to help you go faster in your Wednesday-evening ten. From supplements to Ketones we're told that Weetabix alone is not the breakfast of champions, you've got to drink this go-fast juice or eat that go-faster power bar. The economic interests of the sport limit what we can do.
We can't kick the habit, at this stage that's abundantly clear, a century and more of this discussion has shown us that we can't kick the habit, the culture of chemical assistance is too firmly embedded. But if we can't cut it out, can we cut it down, and somehow close the gateway from legal to illegal?
The debate about finish bottles seems to a seven year itch for the sport, it was 2014 when we last had it, Taylor Phinney one of the more vocal proponents of detoxing the sport. Tramadol then was the bogeyman and the focus of the discussion, when what should have been being discussed was the wider culture of chemical assistance, legal as well as illegal."I'm tired of pills in sport. They may be legal pills, but I'm tired of pills in cycling and I think it's grotesque that it has to be so obvious," Wacker told Feltet.dk.
"It's so obvious. In the big races, people ride around with little containers in their pockets with pills and so on. I've never wanted to take anything myself, and then you know that in all the finals, the others are taking something you're not taking. There are painkillers and caffeine among other things. It's absolutely ridiculous the amount people take. Because you don't know what it might do to a rider's body in 20 years' time," Wacker said, before absolving the teams of responsibility.
"I think it's often the young riders who do it themselves. It's not necessarily the team that's doing it. The riders can get it themselves. It's very easy to get access to."
Michael Barry at that time wrote of gateway drugs, wrote of starting out on multivitamins and ending up on EPO, his words echoing comments made a generation earlier by the likes of Laurent Fignon, Paul Kimmage and Allan Peiper. From Tom Simpson to Bradley Wiggins the sport has a long history of riders who start out criticising the doping of others and end up talking of the need for medical care. Once the gate is open, many find it difficult to resist going through.
The extent of cycling's culture of chemical assistance, the extent to which cycling is a pharmacy on wheels, was exposed in the noughties when Le Journal du Dimanche revealed that 11 non-French teams starting 2004's Tour had requested permission from the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments to import medicines which had no obvious application within cycling. The medical manifest of one team at the 2000 Tour listed 126 different products. It contained 684 individual packages which were calculated to contain 7,422 individual doses. The 2001 manifest for the same team covered 119 different products, made up of 790 packages containing a total of 8,334 individual doses. "These are not racers," the judge at the Festina trial is reported to have said, "they are cycling test tubes."
None of this is new. We all know of Henri Pélissier's dynamite comment from 1924. People have been talking about the use and abuse of stimulants in the sport since forever. Researching the history of the Hour record I came across this comment from William Rowe, the last man to set an Hour record on a Penny-Farthing, in 1886:
”I have consulted the finest physicians and doctors in the United States, and they tell me the greater part of my success lies in my abstinence. I feel myself that it is so. I am just as good one day as another. I never have an off day, whereas people who take stimulants are good today and nothing next day. It sometimes takes them a fortnight to get back into good order. Brother professionals have admitted as much to me. When I rode my greatest distance in the Hour, I had not done any work on a bicycle for a week on account of bad weather, and though I thought I should not be in condition, yet when I came to ride I found I accomplished the greatest performance ever done in the world – and all on tea, too, my boy!”
The culture of chemical assistance is not restricted to cycling, sport is just holding up a mirror to society. Add to that we also have the problem that part of the sport is funded by those offering magic elixirs to help you go faster in your Wednesday-evening ten. From supplements to Ketones we're told that Weetabix alone is not the breakfast of champions, you've got to drink this go-fast juice or eat that go-faster power bar. The economic interests of the sport limit what we can do.
We can't kick the habit, at this stage that's abundantly clear, a century and more of this discussion has shown us that we can't kick the habit, the culture of chemical assistance is too firmly embedded. But if we can't cut it out, can we cut it down, and somehow close the gateway from legal to illegal?