- Jun 14, 2012
- 27
- 1
- 8,580
The Swiss paper Le Temps carried an interesting interview with a sociologist studying the pro peloton.
Original link:
http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/a9c...Tour_de_France_se_cache_un_monde_de_précarité
My translation below.
=======================================================
Profession: racer. For three weeks, the colorful peloton of the Tour de France entertains the masses, whether gathered by the roadside or in front of their tv screens, but the fans passionately following the struggle for the maillot jaune may actually know little about the laborer who's sweating away on the saddle. In Lausanne, the sociologist Olivier Aubel sees the professional cyclist from a different perspective. Along with his colleagues Fabien Ohl and Natascia Taverna, the researcher with the Institute for sport science of the University of Lausanne (Issul) has been conducting interviews amongst the peloton over the last three years, with the goal of understanding its organisation, functioning, and culture. In 2013, Issul had been mandated by the UCI to elaborate and test a set of requirements which teams will have to meet starting in 2017 in order to obtain a World Tour licence. Eight teams, including the Swiss team IAM, have volunteered to test the Issul recommendations as of this season. In late May, Le Temps met with Olivier Aubel to evoke the reality behind the images of the Tour de France.
Le Temps: What is the profile of the average bike racer?
Olivier Aubel: With the exception of the stars of the peloton and the most visible racers, you have an athlete who performs a difficult job for a salary that's relatively modest in comparison to the top global level in other highly media-exposed sports, and even compared to the general population. One racer told us: "I earn 2400 euro per month, and at times I'm going downhill at 110 kph. The hotel had better have a tv, otherwise I'll find myself brooding." He's a domestique, earning the minimum wage set by the collective agreement negotiated between the teams and the UCI. This racer also said "I do the World Tour, the Giro... It's like the NBA of cycling, and yet I'm living with my parents because I don't make enough." A third of his salary goes to the preseason camp in Spain, which comes out of his pocket... Many of them have to live like that. If they don't feel the calling, if they're not hooked by the game enough to accept the very difficult conditions, they don't start. Most of the racers we met live cycling as a passion all the while knowing it's a job. But for some, it's clearly something they suffer through.
LT: What defines the cyclist's trade?
OA: Its first characteristic is that many work hours are spent away from colleagues and support staff. During these "off" times, when the racers are neither in competition nor at camps with their teams, and which can last several weeks at a time, the job seems almost like a form of telecommuting. It's not the fault of the teams, it's just the way the trade is organised. Teams often pay riders as full-timers when they only see them 20% of the year. What's key for the teams is the ability to organise this sort of "work from home" in order to help the racers produce performance.
LT: Yet on the Tour de France, the team concept seems very powerful.
OA: At races, sure, but otherwise they don't meet in the same geographic space, unlike team sports. If you take the World Tour teams, you'll see that the racers are scattered across Europe, and even beyond. Where can you bring them together? Unlike football, there's no stadium. And there are times when it's difficult to get racers together. One team manager explained the case of one of his racers from a distant country. He moved with his wife, but he only had a 1-year contract. His wife never acclimatized, the racer never attained any serenity, and it didn't go well. The widespread use of short-term work contracts makes the process of bringing the group together quite complex. Racers often prefer to stay at home to train, sometimes with racers on other teams, and then join the team at the race site.
LT: What is the business model of a cycling team?
OA: The revenue of a football club depends on 4 pillars: ticket sales, player transfers, the sales of ancillary products, and media rights. For cycling, it's almost exclusively the sponsor. You can imagine the danger faced by a business which has only one customer... The average budget of a Pro-tour team is 15 million francs, for 28-30 racers. In the second division, the budgets are on the order of 3-5 million, with an average of 22 racers, often a physician hired only part-time, and no coach. Between 2005 and 2014, 92 teams registered for the World Tour; 53 went away, 14 managed to keep their sponsor over the long-term. The beautiful images of the Tour de France hide a world of slim means with widely-varying and often insufficient support structures for the racers. There is total instability because of the fragile business model. It's also obvious that it's not scalable. In the World Tour, out of 154 racing days, there are 13 outside of Europe. The cradle of cycling remains France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain. Beyond, there's not much, and it'll be complicated to set up. The globalisation of cycling is very relative.
LT: A single revenue stream, and one event, the Tour de France, that overwhelms all the others...
OA: 80% of the exposure obtained in a season comes from the Tour de France. That's why a 2nd division team struggles to survive; all the sponsors want to be on the Tour. With the UCI assigning points to the top-ten of each event, the racers are sought for the points they'll bring to the team. Since points from an Asian or African race have the same value as points from Europe, which has more competition and a higher standard, teams go recruit racers more for their points than for their actual athletic value, which in turn increases the burden on the other racers.
LT: You mentioned telecommuting, how does that work in practice?
OA: Over the past several years, this telecommuting has been put in place in order to create a relationship between the team and the racer when the latter is training at home on his own. Some teams still have some problems with their star racers who don't want to take part in their training system. The line they give the coach is: "Leave me alone, all you need to know is that I'll train and I'll be the strongest guy on race day." That's what one team recently told me. But on the the one hand, the coach doesn't have any guarantee that the racer will be fit, and on the other, he doesn't know what the racer will have done to be on form. You have to know that there were teams on the World Tour that didn't have a trainer. The "old days" of cycling were dominated by the tandem of the directeur sportif and the racer. Under modern cycling, trainers began to appear, and even teams of trainers, and they brought performance science. One of them recently told me that it takes a minimum of a doctorate in physiology or sports science to be able to prepare an athlete. The goal is to become involved in that whole period of a racer's preparation which up to now has been a kind of black hole.
LT: How can it be done remotely?
OA: Racers receive a race calendar and a training program, usually divided into three layers: season, period, session. The trainer follows up with performance monitoring. You might have noticed those bike computers that track power, cadence, heart rate, distance, time. With these data, the trainer creates target values which the racers hit as best they can, given the weather, their level of fatigue, etc. The trainer recovers the data, debriefs the racer, tracks him on a daily basis.
LT: What does that change when it comes to working conditions?
OA: A fundamental change, a real employer-employee relationship. Previously, a kind of fatalism prevailed: "Well, that's the way it is... you can't be constantly on top of the guys..." Today, the attitude has completely changed. Most managers realize they're CEOs of a business that depends on a single customer: the sponsor. When the sponsor comes and says: "If there's a doping affair, I'm leaving", you don't have much slack. The employer therefore sets up a tracking system that first of all makes sure that the racers are performing (i.e. they're training), then that they're clean (i.e. they're not doping). He oversees them by knowing where they are, what they're doing, with whom they're training, who's the primary physician, etc. More and more teams are setting up this tracking system which can alert them to situations in which the racer might become vulnerable.
LT: Does the physician-trainer still exist?
OA: In the current system, that's no longer possible.
LT: Many consider that doping is part of cycling culture. Do you hold that opinion?
OA: Our approach, which broke with the current mindset, was first off to view the cyclist as a worker. And if you look at him in that way, you'll uncover working and employment conditions that can push him to break the rules. Doping is always being described as the moral failure of an individual because there's a refusal to admit that it's also a problem that inherent to working conditions. On examination, it's very interesting to note that epidemiological studies conducted in other professions (truck drivers, lawyers, physicians) also show a significant use of doping products, which is always explained by working conditions. In sport, the same professional workers are held solely responsible.
LT: Which should we blame: financial pressures or the hard work?
OA: Both. A cyclist can dope to get a better contract, or just to even have a contract the following season. For doping that derives from an employment situation, there you have the racer at the end of his contract who needs results. The transfer market takes place during june and july. Someone who doesn't have a contract after the Tour de France will start to be seriously concerned about his future. He'll be under a lot of pressure during races in August and September, and will be increasingly vulnerable. One team that's currently testing our technical requirements has, for example, put in place an intensified oversight protocol for racers it intends for separation, in order to help them continue training without succumbing to temptation. Doping that derives from working conditions, that's your old-style doping: in order to endure all the saddle hours in the cold, wind, and rain. One racer told me he'd done his six-hour riding session in the snow. You still gotta go out! That takes extraordinary perseverance. When you're tired, you're tempted to slack off, or to take a little amphetamine pill.
LT: Is there a typology of the doped racer?
OA: The researcher always identifies three profiles. In the first case, you have the person who doesn't know, hasn't been informed, takes products, and gets caught. They're less and less common becuase the peloton has been hammered with the prevention message. The second case, that's the racer who knows the rules very well, and breaks them knowing exactly what he's doing. He takes the risk. There you can recognize doping as practiced by certain leaders, who are the best-supported racers. They're the real cheats, and enforcement, especially using the police, is the best way to bring them to account.
LT: Like Lance Armstrong...
OA: Yes. Still, while he was of course a cheat, Lance was also an incredible machine for rationalizing the sport. Before him, you had the Swiss trainer Paul Koechli, who was considered nuts, but who was fifteen years ahead of his time. Alongside his use of doping, Lance Armstrong forced a huge leap forward in training, race technique and tactics, but also in equipment, in the kit's wind resistance, something that can get you a minute over 50 kilometers. At Saint-Etienne in 2002 I think he won by 25 seconds over Ulrich; his jersey allowed him to pick up almost a minute thanks to reduced friction. What made the difference? EPO? Ulrich was also using. It was really the equipment. Armstrong used a titanium frame, more rigid and lighter, when the others were still using steel or aluminum frames.
LT: And the third category?
OA: Racers who have employment constraints such that they believe stimulants are their only recourse. We heard about the case of one racer in the world Tour who'd put on six kilos. His team, which had been oblivious for a long time, takes notice. He's summoned, the doctor and the manager give him three weeks to return to racing weight, or he's out the door. Three weeks later, the racer comes back spot on, and even has good results during the late season. His directeur sportif tells the story in an interview; two days later the racer is tested positive. Its the classic spiral: no oversight, management error, lack of resources available to the employee. In the end, the racer finds himself trapped. Another real life story: a young racer is summoned by his directeur sportif who evaluates the first season as lacking and tells him: "you're not doing your job." The racer gets upset: "No way, it's impossible to put in more than I did this year. I really worked hard. Don't tell me I'm not doing my job, that's insulting." Later, the racer understands what his employer really means by "doing your job", and he brings himself up to standard.
The problem, well, it's the prisoner's dilemma from game theory: it's in your interest to cheat because you can never be sure that the others aren't cheating. And if they cheat and you don't, you're the sucker.
However, we've observed a very striking generational change among the young racers. Those boys coming out of cycling's new wave who shone in the 2014 Tour de France, well I'd be very surprised and disappointed if they were caught someday.
LT: These racers believe they can start winning again without doping?
OA: They don't reason in strategic terms. They tell themselves: "We do what we're supposed to do, and afterwards we'll see." They are also athletes who've carried on with their studies. One young fellow we met, a top-ten at the 2014 Tour de France, sees himself becoming an attorney after cycling. Another is an engineer. These are people who have other professional outcomes available. It's no longer rare to find racers with a university degree. That's been made possible by the broad access to higher education in most European countries, the ones that supply the vast majority of the peloton. The choice of "bike or school" with no possibilty of reconciling the two has become more rare.
LT: Do they still think that doping distorts the field of play?
OA: The generation of the 70s and 80s took corticoids, amphetamines, lots of products to withstand training loads. But they didn't think that affected the balance of power; the best guy was still the guy who trained the hardest, and was therefore the most deserving. Wtih the arrival of EPO and growth hormones, you have a total paradigm shift. Independent of his training effort, the racer will have such a performance gain thanks to the products that in the end he doesn't need to train as much. That disrupts the logic of sport. Some trainers who began in 2000s were struck to find racers who had no idea how to train properly: they were diesels who had never worked with intensity-based training, they just spent hours in the saddle and took their products.
LT: Has cycling emerged from that period?
OA: Yes, totally. I'm talking about an era when every team had its own methods and pharmacology, when they conducted their own testing before races. We spoke with one person who was responsible for making the team's plane reservations. She didn't understand why they always made her buy tickets at the last minute, which made no business sense. Much later, that person understood that it was because the team never knew ahead of time which racers were going to pass the internal doping controls. That doesn't happen any more. Unless the racers are very clever liars. We have to emphasize here the fact that cycling is the sport that has done the most to reform itself and struggle against doping, whether it be in terms of the financial investment by the teams, the promoters, and the UCI, or by setting up mechanisms for fight and prevention.
LT: What is your relationship with racers?
OA: When we show up as sociologists, the interviewees are wary, they think we'll be talking down to them. At the outset, things could be a little tense. On our very first visit to a team, a trainer threatened to kick our ass if we brought up doping. I got chewed out for twenty minutes by a famous directeur sportif who said our work was junk. Now, the climate has changed and that very directeur sportif is the first to implement and defend our recommendations. The UCI is enforcing the list of requirements we established and quite a few teams are receiving us in order to obtain the Issul stamp of approval for their working and employment conditions, which they then present to sponsors as a certification of proper management. They see us more as people who can contribute to a change in cycling culture.
LT: Racers freely talk about their living conditions, but are they also open to conversations about doping?
OA: You have to know that some teams have [the racers] undergo media training [english in the original] to get them used to responding to journalists, and if necessary the police, and by extension to sociologists like us. It's happened that we've heard several racers come out with the same line, word-for-word: "Can you see me trying to explain to my wife how our child is handicapped because of doping?" I heard that in Italy, in Spain, and in France. In fact, it's an extract from the UCI prevention program which they recite just like in a skit. Some of these guys have been detained 48 hours, taken away in cuffs by the police in front of their families; they're not going to be scared of some little sociologist.
Original link:
http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/a9c...Tour_de_France_se_cache_un_monde_de_précarité
My translation below.
=======================================================
Profession: racer. For three weeks, the colorful peloton of the Tour de France entertains the masses, whether gathered by the roadside or in front of their tv screens, but the fans passionately following the struggle for the maillot jaune may actually know little about the laborer who's sweating away on the saddle. In Lausanne, the sociologist Olivier Aubel sees the professional cyclist from a different perspective. Along with his colleagues Fabien Ohl and Natascia Taverna, the researcher with the Institute for sport science of the University of Lausanne (Issul) has been conducting interviews amongst the peloton over the last three years, with the goal of understanding its organisation, functioning, and culture. In 2013, Issul had been mandated by the UCI to elaborate and test a set of requirements which teams will have to meet starting in 2017 in order to obtain a World Tour licence. Eight teams, including the Swiss team IAM, have volunteered to test the Issul recommendations as of this season. In late May, Le Temps met with Olivier Aubel to evoke the reality behind the images of the Tour de France.
Le Temps: What is the profile of the average bike racer?
Olivier Aubel: With the exception of the stars of the peloton and the most visible racers, you have an athlete who performs a difficult job for a salary that's relatively modest in comparison to the top global level in other highly media-exposed sports, and even compared to the general population. One racer told us: "I earn 2400 euro per month, and at times I'm going downhill at 110 kph. The hotel had better have a tv, otherwise I'll find myself brooding." He's a domestique, earning the minimum wage set by the collective agreement negotiated between the teams and the UCI. This racer also said "I do the World Tour, the Giro... It's like the NBA of cycling, and yet I'm living with my parents because I don't make enough." A third of his salary goes to the preseason camp in Spain, which comes out of his pocket... Many of them have to live like that. If they don't feel the calling, if they're not hooked by the game enough to accept the very difficult conditions, they don't start. Most of the racers we met live cycling as a passion all the while knowing it's a job. But for some, it's clearly something they suffer through.
LT: What defines the cyclist's trade?
OA: Its first characteristic is that many work hours are spent away from colleagues and support staff. During these "off" times, when the racers are neither in competition nor at camps with their teams, and which can last several weeks at a time, the job seems almost like a form of telecommuting. It's not the fault of the teams, it's just the way the trade is organised. Teams often pay riders as full-timers when they only see them 20% of the year. What's key for the teams is the ability to organise this sort of "work from home" in order to help the racers produce performance.
LT: Yet on the Tour de France, the team concept seems very powerful.
OA: At races, sure, but otherwise they don't meet in the same geographic space, unlike team sports. If you take the World Tour teams, you'll see that the racers are scattered across Europe, and even beyond. Where can you bring them together? Unlike football, there's no stadium. And there are times when it's difficult to get racers together. One team manager explained the case of one of his racers from a distant country. He moved with his wife, but he only had a 1-year contract. His wife never acclimatized, the racer never attained any serenity, and it didn't go well. The widespread use of short-term work contracts makes the process of bringing the group together quite complex. Racers often prefer to stay at home to train, sometimes with racers on other teams, and then join the team at the race site.
LT: What is the business model of a cycling team?
OA: The revenue of a football club depends on 4 pillars: ticket sales, player transfers, the sales of ancillary products, and media rights. For cycling, it's almost exclusively the sponsor. You can imagine the danger faced by a business which has only one customer... The average budget of a Pro-tour team is 15 million francs, for 28-30 racers. In the second division, the budgets are on the order of 3-5 million, with an average of 22 racers, often a physician hired only part-time, and no coach. Between 2005 and 2014, 92 teams registered for the World Tour; 53 went away, 14 managed to keep their sponsor over the long-term. The beautiful images of the Tour de France hide a world of slim means with widely-varying and often insufficient support structures for the racers. There is total instability because of the fragile business model. It's also obvious that it's not scalable. In the World Tour, out of 154 racing days, there are 13 outside of Europe. The cradle of cycling remains France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain. Beyond, there's not much, and it'll be complicated to set up. The globalisation of cycling is very relative.
LT: A single revenue stream, and one event, the Tour de France, that overwhelms all the others...
OA: 80% of the exposure obtained in a season comes from the Tour de France. That's why a 2nd division team struggles to survive; all the sponsors want to be on the Tour. With the UCI assigning points to the top-ten of each event, the racers are sought for the points they'll bring to the team. Since points from an Asian or African race have the same value as points from Europe, which has more competition and a higher standard, teams go recruit racers more for their points than for their actual athletic value, which in turn increases the burden on the other racers.
LT: You mentioned telecommuting, how does that work in practice?
OA: Over the past several years, this telecommuting has been put in place in order to create a relationship between the team and the racer when the latter is training at home on his own. Some teams still have some problems with their star racers who don't want to take part in their training system. The line they give the coach is: "Leave me alone, all you need to know is that I'll train and I'll be the strongest guy on race day." That's what one team recently told me. But on the the one hand, the coach doesn't have any guarantee that the racer will be fit, and on the other, he doesn't know what the racer will have done to be on form. You have to know that there were teams on the World Tour that didn't have a trainer. The "old days" of cycling were dominated by the tandem of the directeur sportif and the racer. Under modern cycling, trainers began to appear, and even teams of trainers, and they brought performance science. One of them recently told me that it takes a minimum of a doctorate in physiology or sports science to be able to prepare an athlete. The goal is to become involved in that whole period of a racer's preparation which up to now has been a kind of black hole.
LT: How can it be done remotely?
OA: Racers receive a race calendar and a training program, usually divided into three layers: season, period, session. The trainer follows up with performance monitoring. You might have noticed those bike computers that track power, cadence, heart rate, distance, time. With these data, the trainer creates target values which the racers hit as best they can, given the weather, their level of fatigue, etc. The trainer recovers the data, debriefs the racer, tracks him on a daily basis.
LT: What does that change when it comes to working conditions?
OA: A fundamental change, a real employer-employee relationship. Previously, a kind of fatalism prevailed: "Well, that's the way it is... you can't be constantly on top of the guys..." Today, the attitude has completely changed. Most managers realize they're CEOs of a business that depends on a single customer: the sponsor. When the sponsor comes and says: "If there's a doping affair, I'm leaving", you don't have much slack. The employer therefore sets up a tracking system that first of all makes sure that the racers are performing (i.e. they're training), then that they're clean (i.e. they're not doping). He oversees them by knowing where they are, what they're doing, with whom they're training, who's the primary physician, etc. More and more teams are setting up this tracking system which can alert them to situations in which the racer might become vulnerable.
LT: Does the physician-trainer still exist?
OA: In the current system, that's no longer possible.
LT: Many consider that doping is part of cycling culture. Do you hold that opinion?
OA: Our approach, which broke with the current mindset, was first off to view the cyclist as a worker. And if you look at him in that way, you'll uncover working and employment conditions that can push him to break the rules. Doping is always being described as the moral failure of an individual because there's a refusal to admit that it's also a problem that inherent to working conditions. On examination, it's very interesting to note that epidemiological studies conducted in other professions (truck drivers, lawyers, physicians) also show a significant use of doping products, which is always explained by working conditions. In sport, the same professional workers are held solely responsible.
LT: Which should we blame: financial pressures or the hard work?
OA: Both. A cyclist can dope to get a better contract, or just to even have a contract the following season. For doping that derives from an employment situation, there you have the racer at the end of his contract who needs results. The transfer market takes place during june and july. Someone who doesn't have a contract after the Tour de France will start to be seriously concerned about his future. He'll be under a lot of pressure during races in August and September, and will be increasingly vulnerable. One team that's currently testing our technical requirements has, for example, put in place an intensified oversight protocol for racers it intends for separation, in order to help them continue training without succumbing to temptation. Doping that derives from working conditions, that's your old-style doping: in order to endure all the saddle hours in the cold, wind, and rain. One racer told me he'd done his six-hour riding session in the snow. You still gotta go out! That takes extraordinary perseverance. When you're tired, you're tempted to slack off, or to take a little amphetamine pill.
LT: Is there a typology of the doped racer?
OA: The researcher always identifies three profiles. In the first case, you have the person who doesn't know, hasn't been informed, takes products, and gets caught. They're less and less common becuase the peloton has been hammered with the prevention message. The second case, that's the racer who knows the rules very well, and breaks them knowing exactly what he's doing. He takes the risk. There you can recognize doping as practiced by certain leaders, who are the best-supported racers. They're the real cheats, and enforcement, especially using the police, is the best way to bring them to account.
LT: Like Lance Armstrong...
OA: Yes. Still, while he was of course a cheat, Lance was also an incredible machine for rationalizing the sport. Before him, you had the Swiss trainer Paul Koechli, who was considered nuts, but who was fifteen years ahead of his time. Alongside his use of doping, Lance Armstrong forced a huge leap forward in training, race technique and tactics, but also in equipment, in the kit's wind resistance, something that can get you a minute over 50 kilometers. At Saint-Etienne in 2002 I think he won by 25 seconds over Ulrich; his jersey allowed him to pick up almost a minute thanks to reduced friction. What made the difference? EPO? Ulrich was also using. It was really the equipment. Armstrong used a titanium frame, more rigid and lighter, when the others were still using steel or aluminum frames.
LT: And the third category?
OA: Racers who have employment constraints such that they believe stimulants are their only recourse. We heard about the case of one racer in the world Tour who'd put on six kilos. His team, which had been oblivious for a long time, takes notice. He's summoned, the doctor and the manager give him three weeks to return to racing weight, or he's out the door. Three weeks later, the racer comes back spot on, and even has good results during the late season. His directeur sportif tells the story in an interview; two days later the racer is tested positive. Its the classic spiral: no oversight, management error, lack of resources available to the employee. In the end, the racer finds himself trapped. Another real life story: a young racer is summoned by his directeur sportif who evaluates the first season as lacking and tells him: "you're not doing your job." The racer gets upset: "No way, it's impossible to put in more than I did this year. I really worked hard. Don't tell me I'm not doing my job, that's insulting." Later, the racer understands what his employer really means by "doing your job", and he brings himself up to standard.
The problem, well, it's the prisoner's dilemma from game theory: it's in your interest to cheat because you can never be sure that the others aren't cheating. And if they cheat and you don't, you're the sucker.
However, we've observed a very striking generational change among the young racers. Those boys coming out of cycling's new wave who shone in the 2014 Tour de France, well I'd be very surprised and disappointed if they were caught someday.
LT: These racers believe they can start winning again without doping?
OA: They don't reason in strategic terms. They tell themselves: "We do what we're supposed to do, and afterwards we'll see." They are also athletes who've carried on with their studies. One young fellow we met, a top-ten at the 2014 Tour de France, sees himself becoming an attorney after cycling. Another is an engineer. These are people who have other professional outcomes available. It's no longer rare to find racers with a university degree. That's been made possible by the broad access to higher education in most European countries, the ones that supply the vast majority of the peloton. The choice of "bike or school" with no possibilty of reconciling the two has become more rare.
LT: Do they still think that doping distorts the field of play?
OA: The generation of the 70s and 80s took corticoids, amphetamines, lots of products to withstand training loads. But they didn't think that affected the balance of power; the best guy was still the guy who trained the hardest, and was therefore the most deserving. Wtih the arrival of EPO and growth hormones, you have a total paradigm shift. Independent of his training effort, the racer will have such a performance gain thanks to the products that in the end he doesn't need to train as much. That disrupts the logic of sport. Some trainers who began in 2000s were struck to find racers who had no idea how to train properly: they were diesels who had never worked with intensity-based training, they just spent hours in the saddle and took their products.
LT: Has cycling emerged from that period?
OA: Yes, totally. I'm talking about an era when every team had its own methods and pharmacology, when they conducted their own testing before races. We spoke with one person who was responsible for making the team's plane reservations. She didn't understand why they always made her buy tickets at the last minute, which made no business sense. Much later, that person understood that it was because the team never knew ahead of time which racers were going to pass the internal doping controls. That doesn't happen any more. Unless the racers are very clever liars. We have to emphasize here the fact that cycling is the sport that has done the most to reform itself and struggle against doping, whether it be in terms of the financial investment by the teams, the promoters, and the UCI, or by setting up mechanisms for fight and prevention.
LT: What is your relationship with racers?
OA: When we show up as sociologists, the interviewees are wary, they think we'll be talking down to them. At the outset, things could be a little tense. On our very first visit to a team, a trainer threatened to kick our ass if we brought up doping. I got chewed out for twenty minutes by a famous directeur sportif who said our work was junk. Now, the climate has changed and that very directeur sportif is the first to implement and defend our recommendations. The UCI is enforcing the list of requirements we established and quite a few teams are receiving us in order to obtain the Issul stamp of approval for their working and employment conditions, which they then present to sponsors as a certification of proper management. They see us more as people who can contribute to a change in cycling culture.
LT: Racers freely talk about their living conditions, but are they also open to conversations about doping?
OA: You have to know that some teams have [the racers] undergo media training [english in the original] to get them used to responding to journalists, and if necessary the police, and by extension to sociologists like us. It's happened that we've heard several racers come out with the same line, word-for-word: "Can you see me trying to explain to my wife how our child is handicapped because of doping?" I heard that in Italy, in Spain, and in France. In fact, it's an extract from the UCI prevention program which they recite just like in a skit. Some of these guys have been detained 48 hours, taken away in cuffs by the police in front of their families; they're not going to be scared of some little sociologist.
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