I've found the level of cheating too much to tolerate in recent years to keep up. I am keeping one eye on the Irish sprinter in Green, and I will cheer on Romain Bardet for the Malliot Jaune.
Well... since you don't like cheating, do you follow any pro sport at all ?
Well, there's scales of everything. Rugby is my favorite sport and it has an honor code that makes cheating harder and it doesn't have the money to be bought.....Football/Soccer is #2 for me and it has a lot of financial cheating.
But cycling is the king of cheating. When Lance Armstrong was caught, the reason they didn't award the tour retroactively to the 5 riders who finished second to him is that all five had been caught up in drug scandals in prior years so it would have been deeply hypocritical of them.
I do like some of the old-school cycling heroes like Greg Lemond, but there have been too many big-time cheats for me to think there is any real competition there. I hope it's changed, but I'm skeptical.
What you don’t like is cheaters getting caught. That is different.
Cheaters are being caught in cycling because they actually look for them.
Do you know about the ADAMS program ? A pro rider has to log in and tell about his every move 48h in advance so that he can be tested, unannounced. If the testers turn up and he’s not there it’s a no show. 3 no shows and you’re suspended for 2 years.
A soccer team went on strike because they were going to be tested... during training.
By the way, if you take the ratio number of controls / number of positives (I/e cheaters) rugby and soccer are in fact dirtier than cycling... with 10 times less controls (not to mention corruption).
Do you think for a minute that a sport that is doing financial cheating / bribery, where the players sleep with underage prostitutes (soccer) don’t dope ? Honor code ? Come on, you’re smarter than this.
No Soloyan you've got me wrong. When the cheating is so endemic that you have cyclists dropping dead in their 40's, "recovering from testicular cancer" as world-class cyclists, etc., nd you see it over and over and over again, you eventually lose interest. I suspect cycling has become a far more honest sport in recent years, it's just that there were too many blows. I still love Greg Lemond, Laurent Fignon, Hinault, etc., though I suspect in hindsight that they might have done thier fair share of the same thing.
Financial cheating is endemic in soccer, I admit that, and it makes me dislike the teams that do it (Man City and PSG come to mind). In Rugby, there is a growing but by no means systemic problem with doping. Not denying any of that. The 2019 World Cup had random anti-doping tests for 4 players on each team each week. It's not enough, they should test every player after every game. But the history of Rugby being an amateur sport with an honor code really has made a big difference on the level of doping. AS Ronan O Gara said "When we found one person who had been doping, we strung him up and he never played again. That's how it is in Rugby." Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not endemic like it is in cycling.
The big issue with cycling isn't that cyclists are bad people compared to other sports. It's that the risk/reward equation is different. The amount of suffering players go through, the length of the competition, the sheer number of competitors, the fact that until recently we couldn't effectively test for blood doping, the fact that blood doping isn't very effective in 80 / 90 minute sports, etc., all made it easier and more rewarding for cyclists to cheat. There's also the fact that once "the other guys are doing it", you can rightly feel a sense of moral justification doing it too.