What has been happening to sports for decades? If anyone wanted to declare sports dead, they might as well lower that flag now for cycling and be done with it.
As more and more people ask for a proper scrutiny and overhaul of several sports due to rampant and pervasive doping, the athletes are left with little choice but to cheat to be able to compete with the rest. In the search for multiple victories, at all costs, the moral cost has been the abandonment of natural fitness, with more and more compounds secretly developed to give athletes an edge and pass doping tests.
After the disgraceful fall of Lance Armstrong and his protege`, which saturated the news for a while, most of the noise went away. But observers know that the problem of doping has not gone away.
Just this week, Italian champion and Giro d'Italia hopeful, Danilo di Luca, was suspended until more testing is done after there was a positive hit from a test performed before the race.
The athlete had already been banned before and has long been suspected of being tainted by doping, and had tested positive in April.
Like many in the field, Di Luca has a long track record of skirting doping laws. He tested positive twice in 2009 at the Giro. He confessed to the crime to get a more lenient sentence, so he was not banned. However, he had also tested positive for some substance as far back as 2007.
What this case exemplifies, if anything, is that the problem of doping will not go away as long as the perpetrators are given chance after chance to return to the sport. The only way to scare them 'straight' is to make those penalties stick. Without it, there will only be an escalation of the problem.
Op-Ed
Partial Source : France 24 // 5.24.13
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