German television hypocrites

After twelve days of racing -- eleven stages if you don't count the team-time-trial -- German riders have won five of the stages. Three different Germans in all -- Marcel Kittel on stages 1, 10 and 12; Andrew Greipel on stage 6; and Tony Martin in the individual-time-trial -- yet nobody in their own country will have seen this new generation of German cyclists thanks to the generation before them as well as hypocritical television broadcasters.

Off the back of a number of doping scandals involving German riders, from Jan Ullrich to Erik Zabel and the entire Telekom team for that matter, German TV pulled the plug on Tour coverage several years ago. And it wasn't just the German riders it was the sport itself. They lost their patience for drug problems in the sport and walked away.

On the face of it you might think that is quite admirable ... and it would be if they did it for sport entirely, but it appears the only sport they gave up on was the one that was doing the relevant testing and taking the punishment of cheats seriously.



German television continues to show football, it no doubt broadcasted Wimbledon in its entirety, and it will cover north American sports such as the NFL and the NBA. All these sports have the same doping issues that cycling had, yet they are not being held to task by the media or fans because they don't care to go to the levels that cycling did in order to weed out the cheats. Cycling fans want to know what was going on and as a result the mainstream media -- sensing a easy scandal -- jumped on board to hammer the sport into the ground while ignoring any other sport. And the hammering hasn't relented despite cycling appearing to have dramatically changed its ways.

Sure it still has cheats, but I'd bank on their being less now than in any other sport. There's a biological passport that few other sports have, there is out of season testing which few sports do, and there is blood testing which many sports ignore. The punishment for a positive test in cycling is two years, some sports such as the National Hockey League (on the extremely rare -- bordering on never -- occasions they have a positive test) suspend for a handful of games.

Cycling has seen a shift in attitudes. More cyclists than ever have a vocal stance to anti-doping and are speaking out against it when there is a positive test or a scandal. I never hear a footballer in Germany or elsewhere talk about an anti-doping stance or condemning the practice within the game. If they do they're ridiculed much as a cyclist might have been a decade or more ago.

Indeed, these other sports tend to be where cycling was in the 1990's, prior to the Festina scandal when the sport turned a blind eye to drug use and the fans weren't properly educated on it to care less.

And the ones suffering the most are the present day riders themselves, or in this case those three German's winning. All of them have spoken out against doping in the past, in particular Greipel and Kittel. It was Kittel who Tweeted last year: "I feel SICK when I read that Contador, Sanchez & Indurain still support Armstrong. How does someone want to be credible by saying that?" You just wouldn't hear that anywhere else. And yet they're winning now and their nationals television stations don't want to know. They'd much prefer to show other sports that turn a blind eye.

Someone told me the other day following the Wimbledon title match, how little out of season testing and blood testing is done in the sport and how they ought to step that up. I couldn't help but say that if they'd any sense they'd stay as is for as much as they'll expose the truth and give fans a truer game, all they'll do in the process is cause disillusion among their fans, cost themselves sponsorship and money, and -- if the German's are anything to go by -- television coverage.

Cycling deserves more credit than it's getting and this German TV boycott is just one dramatic example of it.