Baseball could learn from cycling

By Max J. Dickstein, amNewYork Sports Editor | mdickstein@am-ny.com

July 13, 2007

While baseball trembles in near-motionless contemplation of its own performance-enhanced past, cycling has sprinted ahead with a doping reconciliation that might be a model for the foot-dragging MLB.

Cycling's anti-doping efforts so far have cleared away only a few of the clouds of doubt hanging over the sport, but efforts by officials and athletes to reckon with rampant doping in cycling have yielded notable progress.

The bad apples are falling away from the tree.

The 1996 Tour de France champion, Bjarne Riis, admitted using the hormone EPO to his advantage that year. Two other big-name cyclists who are in their primes -- Germany's Jan Ullrich and Italy's Ivan Basso -- have been kicked off their teams, suspended from competition and disgraced amid overwhelming suspicion of doping.

The bloodletting figures to worsen for the sport before it begins to subside. The International Cycling Union, or UCI, made all Tour racers sign a new anti-doping charter before this year's Tour began on Saturday; riders had to say they are not doping, submit to testing and agree to pay a year's salary and face a two-year ban if caught.

And more riders surely will be caught.

These actions represent the UCI's all-out effort to achieve transparency and swift accountability. The crackdown, which has decimated the present crop of top riders, is as necessary as it is drastic.

Someday soon, we may also be able to sort out the legacy of the sport's greatest champion, Lance Armstrong, winner of all seven Tours de France between 1999 and 2005.

Many Europeans vilify Armstrong as the sport's most clever and egregious cheater, while Americans tend to lionize him, admitting only that the drugs that helped him defeat life-threatening cancer in 1996 enhanced his historic performance.

Armstrong has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancers.

Cycling recognizes that it is in a fight to recover its credibility, and the best way to do that is by energetically heeding its fans' demands for accountability and clean competition.

Hey baseball. Are you watching?