Last Sunday, Chris Froome became the 20th person in the history of the Tour de France to win for a second time what is arguably the world’s toughest sporting event. It is an extraordinary achievement that gives him an unassailable claim to a place in the pantheon of British greats.
This quiet, polite Briton has an unmerited popularity problem. Part of it is because he is not Sir Bradley Wiggins, and partly it is because he was born in Kenya and now lives in Monaco.
Yet, the real problem is not him, but his sport. Cycling is so mistrusted that nothing is taken at face value. Even Froome’s obvious struggle to keep it together as he rode the last agonising hairpins on the cruel 14km Alpe d’Huez climb, in Saturday’s 20th and penultimate stage, was tainted by the memory of Lance Armstrong’s ‘coup de poker’ in 2001, when his doping-assisted speed and endurance allowed him to feign exhaustion and then produce an unbeatable spell of acceleration.
In vain has Chris Froome’s Team Sky–launched in 2009 in a blaze of commitments to winning the Tour and doing it “clean”–published previously top-secret performance data. In vain have serious journalists described the revolutionary training regime, or its legendary pursuit of marginal advantage.
Trust is tough to win back. And it matters in the way that it matters, say, that footballers with rape or domestic violence convictions are penalised by their sport. Unlike anything else, sport holds out to the world the promise of a reward for virtue.
Cycling has had a cheating problem since it began in 1903. But the trust issue dogs every exceptional athlete. At the weekend it emerged that Mo Farah, Britain’s favourite Olympic hero, who won the 3,000m at the Anniversary Games on Saturday, was questioned by the US anti-doping agency lawyer investigating claims that his trainer, Alberto Salazar, had breached anti-doping rules.
Part of the problem is that while the athletes themselves fear their rivals are doping, there will always be an incentive to do it too. That’s the Lance Armstrong rationale. The only way of destroying the cheating mindset is a fear of getting found out.
Ever more rigorous testing by the authorities ought to be restoring confidence; it should be the first step on the long road to rebuilding public trust. Yet, sometimes it seems that some sporting authorities hesitate for fear of damaging their sport’s reputation yet more. Or they take inexplicable decisions, like allowing Bolt’s great rival, the US sprinter Justin Gatlin, twice banned for drug offences, back on to the track.
It is true that there is no limit to the inventiveness of sports medicine, and many grey areas where it is hard to pick the legal from the illegal. Yet sport clings to the Ciceronian ideal of a life of sacrifice in pursuit of excellence. It still inspires millions.
It offers the world a beguiling, although some would say deceptive, model of a creative, co-operative, joyful society, one where proper values bring just rewards. For as long as trust in the honesty of sportsmen and women still matters, it is still possible to hope that the cynical society in which we live can be made to reward virtue.
