This Header Image of Elisa Longo Borghini Is Totally Unrelated to This Newsletter's Top Story
Lidl-Trek's Italian climbers lay siege to Jebel Hafeet, but the top news of the week is otherwise a little...steroidy...
I don’t talk about what I do for a living very much, because explaining the word “blog” to normies, as a thirtysomething-year-old with a wife and a cat and a master’s degree and health insurance, is kind of mortifying, even in 2024.1 “Cycling newsletter” is even more novel, and the first question I get asked by people who don’t follow the sport is invariably about PEDs.
You understand why; American road cycling was built almost as a cult of personality around the most famous drug cheat in the history of sports. It’s not a stain that goes away quickly. But things are generally better now. Testing is more rigorous, the culture less permissive of doping, and when a rider does piss hot, it’s not treated like a moral panic.
Which is good, because the UCI handed down two provisional suspensions this week. The first, to French rider Franck Bonnamour of Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, regards “unexplained abnormalities in his Biological Passport.” The Biological Passport2 is basically a cyclist’s maintenance record, containing a history of his drug tests and relevant physiological markers. On Wednesday, the UCI announced a second provisional suspension to Dutch rider Antwan Toelhoek, who had anabolic steroids in an out-of-competition test sample from November. Toelhoek, 29, raced for several years on the World Tour with Jumbo-Visma and Lidl-Trek, and is now with Portuguese third-tier outfit Sabgal-Anicolor.
As positive tests go, these are hardly earthshaking, but it’s been a big few days for performance-enhancing drugs. A group of venture capital sickos, led by Peter Thiel, wants to put on something called the Enhanced Games, sort of a Doping Olympics, in order to show how pharmacology can push the boundaries of human capability. Me? Not a big fan, for two reasons. One meets the premise of the Enhanced Games on its own terms, the other is a little more abstract.
Having worked in baseball for more than a decade, I’ve had lots of time to work out a coherent position on PEDs. I won’t have a Hall of Fame vote for (counts on fingers) another four years, and I haven’t given much thought to how I’ll fill out my first ballot. I also don’t know how much weight, positive or negative, to give a player’s off-the-field life, for good or evil. What I do know is that if a player is on the ballot, I won’t abstain from voting for him purely on the grounds of PED usage. I think that in the late 20th century we got way too precious, as a society, about drugs in sports, elevating one kind of wrongdoing over other far more harmful actions.3
With that said, this shit’s bad for you. In cycling, the golden age of doping was all about jacking up red blood cell count, so guys were getting sick from bad blood infusions or taking so much EPO their hearts couldn’t pump their blood. More than that, sports are ostensibly about the inspiring nature of human achievement. Not to be too credulous, but: Hard work, perseverance, victory as a reward for dedication. All that white-bread protestant stuff is really important. And as much as I have a morbid scientific curiosity in seeing how fast a roided-up monster can run 100 meters, that just isn’t as interesting as the genuine article. The perversion of that ideal is why people find doping so offensive in the first place.
Which brings up point no. 2: Thiel isn’t involved in this sort of thing because he’s interested in beating the world record for the 100 meter backstroke. He’s in this because he’s devoted a large portion of his life’s work4 toward what could charitably be called transhumanism. Here’s a 2016 headline from Vanity Fair: “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself With Young People’s Blood.” It’s about how Peter Thiel wants to inject himself with young people’s blood. Normalizing performance-enhancing drugs in sports is one way of shifting the Overton window for the other half-cocked-to-ghastly things Thiel wants to do to stave off having his soul weighed. This is a vanity project from someone you’d cross the street to avoid if he weren’t worth almost $7 billion. Spare me.