For me, July starts with the red, white and blue, then quickly turns to yellow. The yellow jersey worn by the overall leader of the Tour de France.
I’ve been a big fan of the Tour de France for the past decade and a half. I admit that it was the success of Lance Armstrong that brought me to it. The dethroned champion taught us a few compliance lessons. The cheating did not keep me from sticking with the sport.
Any fan of professional cycling knows that there is long history of drug abuse in the peleton. Many Tour de France riders had been subject to disciplinary action for doping. Only two of the podium finishers in the Tour de France from 1996 through 2005 have not been directly tied to likely doping through admission, sanctions, public investigation or exceeding the UCI hematocrit threshold. The sole exceptions were Bobby Julich – third place in 1998, and Fernando Escartin – third place in 1999. The official records have no winners during the Lance Armstrong years.
You can’t ignore the history of cheating in the Tour de France, just as you cannot ignore the steroid era of baseball. The cheaters were ahead of the organization’s will to enforce and ahead of the organization’s ability to catch the cheaters.
Those with incentives to win are going throw resources at staying ahead of the regulators. We saw that in cycling. We saw that in baseball. We saw it on Wall Street.
It now seems that cycling’s governing bodies are serious about keeping doping out of the sport. It also appears that the science of detection has caught up to the science of cheating. There is less incentive to cheat if you think the chances of getting caught are remote. Mr. Armstrong was tested hundreds of times. The few times that an anomaly was spotted, it was washed away by the poor testing or whitewashed by the governing body.
Sports, as with finance, are filled with rules that don’t always make sense. We can look at football and the enforcement being levied against Tom Brady and the Patriots organization. Missing from all of this is whether it matters how the balls are inflated.
I think some will see some parallels between the competition of sports and the competition of finance.
Once a homer, always a homer!
Always a homer.