The dealers and wheelers

I'm with Geoff Burndred and those who did not cheer Jeremy Yates' win in last weekend's Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge.

Burndred, you will recall, pedalled across the line second, behind Yates, then vented his frustration that he had had to race a convicted doper.

Yates has been banned for two years after a positive test for the muscle-building steroid testosterone was confirmed last month.

His positive was known before the Taupo race, yet Yates, bold as brass, fronted, won and pocketed the winner's purse.

He slipped through a gap created by a delay in cycling officials processing the paperwork of the ban.

It was not a good look, and Cycling New Zealand may have been better to withdraw his racing licence and take the small risk of its decision being challenged.

Yates won $2000 at Taupo. To their credit, race organisers stumped up a winner's cheque for Burndred too - but the money is hardly the issue.

Yates should have been shown the door. There's no argument that he's talented, as his 2000 world junior road race title shows. But rather than talent, what has too often been shown to be lacking in professional road cycling is ethics.

That's why it shares a tainted reputation with the likes of track and field and weightlifting.

That reputation was earned generation by generation, decade by decade, scandal by scandal. From the suspicious death of Arthur Lindon in 1886, to fellow Englishman Tommy Simpson's fatal amphetamine-induced collapse on Mt Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France, to Michel Pollentier being caught a decade later with a contraption down his shorts designed to produce a sample of someone else's urine, to the Festina scandal of 1998.

On that occasion a Festina soigneur (team helper), Willie Voet, was caught en route to that year's Tour de France with his car packed with hundreds of doses of blood dopers, growth hormone and steroids for the nine-rider team.

Voet, whose job was to administer the drugs, was jailed and later wrote a book admitting to doping riders for 20 years without a single failed doping test.

The Festina affair put paid to the sport's spin that there was no significant doping problem and led to the formation of the World Anti-Doping Authority.

Yates refuses to discuss his failed dope test. Of the Taupo controversy, he said he submitted his entry with everyone else and it was accepted.

His father, Bryan, reportedly said his son's positive drug test was not newsworthy. Wrong. Doping is sports' biggest issue; its credibility is at stake. Joining the dopers is the most newsworthy thing an athlete can do. It can also damn him or her to a lifetime of denial.

When Yates' positive test first made the news in September, he told a reporter that the media knew more than he did.

Yet, according to the Flemish Anti-Doping Agency, it had phoned and written letters throughout the eight months it took to deal with it.

"We even sent a doctor to his home to get a sample, again with no success," said agency spokesman Jaak Fransen.

Part of the process is to check for an innocent explanation. A little chemistry lesson: drug testers measure the ratio of testosterone to epi-testosterone. The average normal ratio is about 1:1. To limit the possibility of picking up people with a naturally high level of testosterone, the legal limit is set at 6:1 (to be reduced to 4:1 from next year).

If an athlete exceeds the 6:1 ratio the possible innocent explanations are that he naturally has an extremely high ratio or it is a medical aberration caused by a condition such as testicular cancer.

A naturally high level would show up in all the athlete's tests. Yates has raced in Europe for three seasons.

If caused by an illness, further medical tests can confirm that. The agency said Yates did not respond to its requests for a medical certificate or a further sample.

Yates is in no way unique. Any talented young rider with ambition to make it to the top in professional road cycling in Europe eventually runs into an ethical dilemma.

Jonathan Vaughters, a former US Postal team-mate of six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, wrote about this in Cycling Weekly magazine in October.

Vaughters wrote of a hypothetical star amateur cyclist who, on joining the elite professional ranks, finds he can't compete, yet riders he once beat are succeeding.

The cyclist discovers the answer is doping, that by taking drugs he can increase his power by 10 per cent or more, enough to move from the back of the pack to the front. He's come to understand the ethos of the grand circus of professional cycling which has become his world: "do what you have to do to get the job done".

The cyclist has come to a crossroads, writes Vaughters. What does he choose?

It's a dilemma familiar to Stephen Swart, a New Zealander who rode the Tour de France three times during the 1990s, twice as a lieutenant for Armstrong.

"At the end of the day it comes down to you either join them or you get out," Swart told me after his retirement. "It's not a level playing field anymore. We all have to face that in the end,"

What would you do, asks Vaughters in his article.

"Do you stick to your moral beliefs ... remain clean but know your dream of being a pro, of riding the Tour de France will soon be over, that your 10 years of sacrifice to get this far will end in 'failure'?

"Or do you choose to 'get the job done'? Lose your soul but keep your job? Keep your dream but know it is false?"

Whatever choice Yates may have faced, his testosterone positive means he will be looked at in a new light: a question mark will hang over his strength, his heavily muscled legs, his performances.

His positive sample came from a random test in a race in the small Belgian town of Wanzele in March, soon after he won the Emirates Tour as part of a New Zealand squad.

Credit Agricole, a Tour de France team which includes Kiwi Julian Dean, signed him, then suspended him after news in September of his positive drug test.

Yates represented New Zealand in the Olympic road race in August. Though he knew his March sample had tested positive, New Zealand's officials did not.

It became public knowledge a week before the world road championships in Italy, yet Yates was allowed to ride for his country.

Had he won a medal, New Zealand would likely have faced a Jerome Young-type situation. Young, a member of the United States' track and field relay team, was stripped of his 2000 Sydney Olympic gold because of a positive steroid test the previous year.

The United States is fighting a recommendation by the athletics' world body (IAAF) that all members of the relay team be disqualified because of the participation of Young, who was banned for life after testing positive for erythropoetin (EPO) in July.

Cycling New Zealand claims it was hamstrung, not having confirmation of Yates' positive.

Belgian authorities were slow in determining Yates' case and may have been tardy dispatching documents, but reporters were able to get confirmation. Why not our officials?

They could have done what Yates' professional team did and stood him down.

Ignoring doping hasn't worked in the past. Nor will a soft approach change an environment in which talented cyclists are faced with the choice that Vaughters describes.

* Phil Taylor studied sports doping while on a journalism fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

The Test

* Drug testers measure the ratio of testosterone to epi-testosterone. The average normal ratio is about 1:1.

* The legal limit is set at 6:1 (to be reduced to 4:1 from next year).

* If an athlete exceeds the 6:1 ratio the possible innocent explanations are that he naturally has an extremely high ratio or it is a medical aberration caused by a condition such as testicular cancer.