There was a remarkable picture in the Independent’s sports section the other morning showing a lone cyclist tearing up a mountain road in the Italian Alps. The high pastures were thronged with people — thousands of them — and most are cheering like crazy. The eye is caught by a green, white and red tricolore, held resplendently aloft. The race was the Giro d’Italia, second only to the Tour de France in the ranks of great stage races, and the cyclist was the 32-year-old Italian Ivan Basso. He was surging back into contention for the maglia rosa — yellow jerseys in the Tour but pink in the Giro — by climbing the fearsomely steep Monte Zoncolan some four minutes ahead of his nearest rivals.
Basso was banned from the sport for a couple of years because he was caught up in the so-called Operacion Puerto drugs scandal in Spain in 2006 — admitting later that although he hadn’t blood-doped, he certainly planned to. A brilliant career had been jeopardised, and disgrace fell on Basso’s head. Except did it? That picture told a different story, and it seemed to sum up an ambivalence about cheating that goes to the heart of this often tawdry yet compelling, extraordinary and admirable sport.
No one wants to believe that a hero is really a villain, which is partly why the latest round of accusations against Lance Armstrong failed to gain lasting traction. It didn’t help that the accuser, the American Floyd Landis, was himself stripped of his 2006 Tour title for taking testosterone. Landis’s quest for people to back him up proved fruitless, and Armstrong, for all the rumours that have swirled around him for many years, remains the supreme champion.
Now cycling eagerly awaits the Texan’s second Tour since he came out of a four-year retirement for last year’s race when, at 37, he showed he still had it in him by finishing an astonishing third. All in all this year’s Tour is shaping up to be pretty special. There’s Armstrong, this time with a team he has created himself (Radioshack) and although he knocked himself about a bit in a crash the other day he’s bound to be a tough competitor. There’s last year’s Tour winner, Alberto Contador of Spain, who was then Armstrong’s team-mate, an arrangement that was always going to make life tricky for both of them, so now the two men can have a go at each other good and proper.
And, perhaps most important of all, there’s Team Sky, the first British team to enter the Tour for aeons, a multi-million-pound outfit whose ultimate aim is to replicate on the road the dominance that GB has enjoyed in track cycling for many years. Sky doesn’t have our sprint sensation Mark Cavendish, but it does have the amazing beanpole and hell-of-a-dude Bradley Wiggins, whose fourth place last year was the best British showing in the Tour for 25 years. Can Sky’s expensively assembled talents — a mixture of the homegrown and the Continental — lift Brad on to the podium? Could the boy who grew up in an apartment block in Maida Vale even take the title? If that happened then Boris Johnson’s bike-hire scheme wouldn’t be able to cope.
The Champions’ League Final in the Bernabeu: 22 of the most skilful players in the world and two of Europe’s greatest coaches. And Inter’s first goal? A long punt from goalkeeper Julio Cesar, a flicked header from Milito to Sneijder, a quick return pass, and Milito scores. It was classic Wimbledon FC Route One from circa 1987-88. Looks like Dave Bassett was on to something.
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