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05 Chris Froome at the TDF 2013 launch © Simon MacMichaelVideo: Froome says cycling is cleanest sport
In a video interview on The Guardian, Chris Froome has said that he believes cycling is now “one of the cleanest sports, if not the cleanest” because of the testing, whereabouts controls and biological passport that riders are now subject to.
Froome explained that he has to log in to a website every day to let anti-doping authorities know where he is, so that he could be tested at any time, and that his blood is sampled “almost every month” so that it can be monitored for signs of cheating.
As well as the pressure of competing for the victory at the Tour de france, Froome and Team Sky had to handle constant questions about doping.
“Not only were we thinking abot the race and the challenges that presented but also that aspect off the bike of having to answer questions about our legitimacy,” said Froome. “I completely understand those questions, It’s normal given the revelations from Lance Armstrong’s era.”
Here’s the video:
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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28 comments
@Simon E, did you mean "should *not* be"?
Dopers being caught in Italy and Turkey show there are still some cheats but that they are being caught. There is also change of mood in the peloton. USADA is at least doing more tests on cyclists than many other sports:
http://www.usada.org/sport-testing-numbers-2013
Stating that today's whereabouts, biopassport and other measures are the same as the laughable setup in the late 90s and early 2000s is either plain stupid or disingenuous. Tyler Hamilton's book and the evidence in last year's testimonies demonstrate the methods used and so on. Plenty of stuff here and don't forget David Walsh even wrote a book about it:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/index-of-lance-armstrong-doping-alle...
While Froome's performances understandably raise eyebrows, he should be villified as a doper. It would be nice to at least have some smoke before the Twitterati and armchair experts declare there is a fire.
With shit like this I'm not surprised Wiggins 'let go' with some expletives last year. Perhaps you would like to swap places for a while and see what it's like... No, I didn't think so.
Says Froome, the biggest steroid junkie on the planet
Tell you what everyone, let's not bother feeding the troll eh? What a ridiculous statement.
Cleanest sport? Possibly. Clean sport? No.
The two chumps from Vini Fantini at the Giro peed in the tent on that one.
Is chess a sport? I bet they do some serious stuff before a match. Thankfully they have stopped the double brain implant scandal.
the doping arguement will go on forever. Speculation will be perpetual regardless of sport, positive or negative results. the larger the sport, the further their head is in the sand.
MLB is now at the very beginning of the learning curve of how to deal with it.
the result. Ryan Braun will miss the remainder of this season, without approx $4M US. however next year he plays and will earn over $100M US.
I just can't stand it anymore.
Umm…
Other sports? Did you forget this recent gem.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jul/20/tyson-gay-asafa-powell-doping
Possibly two of the biggest names in world athletics. And it's known that Messi took HGH, most certainly doping. These are big names, but it's kind of swept under the carpet by the media in other sports for some reason.
Take a look at the UKAD sanctions page. You've got to go past a lot of other sports before you find a cyclist, and even that was for going home early.
Can't understand why those basketballers keep getting done for cannabinoids tho.
http://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-violations/
Is it me or does Mr Froome look incredibly hungover in this interview (maybe 1.5 pints of lager shandy)?
And so another dopey thread lol
Yep, cycling is the cleanest sport. No need to dope anymore. Thanks to marginal gains, it's possible to climb mountains as fast as Armstrong & Pantani.
Elaborate?
Which mountains? Were they at the same point in the Tour? What were the prevailing wind conditions? How aggressive was the racing on these climbs? What was the temperature? Etc,etc....
No wonder Brailsford didn't want to release any data; very much a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If I worked for a pro team - as rider or staff - I don't think I'd ever look at an internet forum again. I know how the media and armchair experts can get wound up over technology that they understand so little of (when it's the field I work in), so it must be even worse for them.
We know that other sports have drugs issues, horse racing !!!, just look at athletics, footballers have missed drugs tests, why ?
I would bet my house that if all sports had the same testing as cycling we would be catching a lot more cheats in those sports.
No sport will ever be totally clean as some people will always cheat, that is human nature, but don't bring down a whole sport for one or two idiots, cycling is the only sport that I am aware of that is getting cleaner, we can always argue that there is more to do, Rome wasn't built in a day as they say.
The biggest change really is the culture, where once it was accepted, now it isn't, this is good.
What we really need to know is how come Lance was tested like a gazillion times and supposedly never had a positive test, yet was cheating all along. And how come riders like that Turkish bloke and Santambrogio still think they can get away with it today.
Is the testing system water tight and how do we know it is?
There are clearly masking agents etc and dodgy doctors still flouting the system.
I agree though that there are lots of cheats in other sports that get much less coverage, I believe athletics has a more serious problem, I mean half of the womens running world records are clearly not clean.
He bribed the UCI.
There were no reliable tests for EPO at that time. The only ridiculous measure was a hematocrit limit which the cheating cyclists knew how to stay just under despite EPO doping. Armstrong's blood samples have failed current tests from what I understand.
In 1999, Lance Armstrong failed FOUR tests for corticosteroids. The UCI broke its own rules by accepting a backdated certificate as a TUE. The UCI also suspended its anti-doping rules to enable Armstrong to enter the 2009 Tour Down Under. It's possible that in the intervening ten years the UCI was at all times beyond reproach, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately though, there is precious little evidence of this wider-sport focus actually happening, it's just us moaning on a narrow-focus website that isn't even seen by fans of other sports. I'm not currently optimistic. Mercuryone I hope you're right (last paragraph).
Good for him. The BBC were asking Chris Hoy this morning about Froome and whether he was clean. If I was Froome or Hoy I would be asking why journalists are still pointing a narrow beam torch on cycling - rather than switching on the room light and asking rugby, football, tennis, swimming and athletics whether they have their camps in order?
Of course after what happened to Walsh and Kimmage no football hack is going to ask a premiership manager whether they think star players peeing in a cup twice a year is due diligence.
It's a ticking time bomb just like MP expenses and banking regulations. I'll give it another 2 years before they find the next Fuentes and the Great British Press start coming up with thorough investigative journalism across sport.
^^^ this
In other news....
Can we stop asking him about doping now please?
"The cleanest sport"?
Erm - lets not get carried away now Chrissy lad
According to Joey Barton the extent of the worlds richest sport's doping policy is an occasional urine test - something which was discredited 20 odd years ago.
Of course. I'm not accusing footballers of cheating to get insanely rich and successful, that's not in human nature...
...repeat for Tennis/Athletics/any sport that can get you a lot of money.
Cycling probably still has a problem but at least it's more or less in the open, almost all other sports have their head in the sand as it'd cost them £££ in sponsorship money if it were discovered their stars were cheating.
Yep, Phil Mickelson won by a large margin too on Sunday, just in time for me to switch over to Paris. I would like to know how many doping tests he has had? Or could you spread whats in his veins on toast?
Looks cleaner than AFL at the moment....
Well, if you exclude any sport which you couldn't really take PEDs to become more successful. The doping involved in athletics and other aerobic endurance sports is without doubt far greater than cycling