Mark Cavendish, the best UK cyclist?

Cheating in sport's open to philosophical debate, init.

There seems to be this idea that enhancements applied inside the athlete somehow make them less responsible for pulling off amazing feats of strength, speed, power, and endurance. Look at track and field athletics - not so long ago, atheletes didn't have spiked footwear, something that knocks whole seconds off the times produced in sprint events. If you don't wear them, you're not going to win. But this is basically benefitting from technological enhancement, which is exactly what taking a newly synthesized substance is doing.

Biffalo Bull mentioned how the superman position wasn't cheating at one point in history. Equally, having a sub 6.7kg bike wasn't against the rules for a bit, whilst it was possible to build such a machine, and that could easily have been the winning edge in any mountain stage, as much as a dose of testosterone - in fact, externally applied technological enhancements are probably more reliable aids, so are more unequivocally part of 'cheating'.

The argument about doping being bad because it detracts from a level playing field is complete bollocks. There are certainly other issues to consider (health of athletes etc), but I don't really give a fuck, and have enjoyed some seminal moments in sport where all kinds of 'cheating' (worn, applied, imbibed, ridden, injected, whatever) have been in full effect. World-class atheletes are genetically predisposed to pull of some of these mind-blowing acheivements, and it's a natural human urge to want to do everything possible to see people go faster, higher, further, and so on...

The enhancement given by doping, especially with something like EPO, often has no correlation to how natuarally gifted a cyclist you are. It's more to do with how your body reacts to the drug.

Look at Bjarne Riis TDF finishes - never a particulary gifted cyclist.

'89 - 95th
'90 - DNF
'91 - 107th
'92 - Didn't start
'93 - 5th
'94 - 14th
'95 - 3rd
'96 - 1st
'97 - 7th
'98 - 11th

Have a guess which year he started using EPO.

I'd rather watch naturally gifted climbers duking it out on the high cols rather than charged up domestiques racing up there with their mouths closed