Laugh tracks and doping violations

For some odd reason, my wife enjoys watching old episodes of Golden Girls as she gets ready for work. As I'm in the bathroom brushing my teeth, or checking my email in the office, I'll hear her laughing along with the laugh track on the show. "Did one of the characters make a joke about being old or something?" I'll say, mocking the predictable and highly formulaic humor in a show like Golden Girls. It's part of our morning routine.

Today, as my wife watched her elderly Florida companions on TV, she heard me exclaim as I looked over my RSS feed. "Wow", I said, as I read over the news of Contador's suspension. "What happened?" my wife asked, then mockingly added, "are there shocking news about a doping case in the world of cycling?" She laughed, but knew that was likely the case. Cycling and TV sitcoms like Golden Girls, it turns out, are similarly predictable. It was only last Friday, after all, that news about the Armstrong investigation coming to a close were released. So with news stories like these popping up faster than the laugh track on a sitcom rerun, what are we as fans to do?

My suggestion is not that we bury our heads in the sand, or that we look away in horror. Instead, (and at the risk of sounding like my mother during her brief New Age phase) I think we could look inward a bit, and focus on the aspects that made us fall in love with cycling. The beauty of it, the struggles riders face, the monumental backdrops against which these struggles take place. Doing this is worth a try, because the emotions that cycling brings up are ours. They are real, and thus unlikely to change as rapidly as podium places at the Tour de France. Taking this attitude will be hard for many cycling fans, who have historically enjoyed being experts in nearly ever topic related to cycling, instead of simply enjoying the sport. Legal issues? Cycling fans have those covered. Aerodynamics and mechanical engineering? Offshore outsourcing? Physiology? Nutrition? Yes, almost every cycling fan has at some time or another proclaimed to be an expert in one or all of these topics.

So while the notion of being regarded as an expert in the use of clenbuterol by the livestock industry in Western Europe may be alluring, I would urge cycling fans to back away from the Wikipedia entries about bronchodilators, as well as putting down the hematology textbooks. Yes, we are all entitled to our opinions in these cases, and that includes our drive to voice said opinions. But the more invested you become in aspects of the sport that are likely to shift, the more likely that your enjoyment of said sport will be spoiled. So enjoy the feelings that sport brings out in you, because they'll never be charged with a doping violation, or cleared of one either. Come to think of it, it's very unlikely that they'll ever be tested.

This, I would argue, is a far better option than simply choosing to disengage completely, particularly from something we love. In my opinion, this point of view was best voiced by author Matt Rendell in the closing chapter of his book The Death of Marco Pantani. In it, Rendell states the following about the conundrum that modern-day cycling fans find themselves in:

"[There] is an alternative to abject disengagement, which may also have a redemptive quality. Watching contemporary sport means acknowledging surface reality as an interim state, prone to re-evaluation, even far in the future. It requires another way of seeing, a double vision or off-center gaze, like Inuit looking into snow, in which surface appearances are taken not as reality but as gateways to potentially unpredictable truths... Never write about your heroes, they say. Maybe. But maybe, too, by believing in them a little less, we may credit them with a little more humanity. We may also find we believe in ourselves a little more."

And that, I think, is at the core of where we as fans find ourselves today. Stars in the sport will rise and fall. They will have supporters and detractors, but our love for the sport can remain unchanged, perhaps because it's the one thing that we have some ownership over.

Read more from Klaus at Cycling Inquisition.