Can a person risk his own life to improve his skills in sport? Can a person risk his family life to go faster on a bicycle? Probably yes, as the recent doping scandals continue to confirm.

There are a lot of factors of interest in sports: fame and money, for example, but it is mainly money that makes some people lose their mind and fall into a vicious circle. They always want more, and the people around them want more victories, more emotions, more everything.

Cycling is a competitive sport drawing on the mental and physical skills of the riders, as well as speed and technical equipment. The desire to improve your ability should stay within the limits of everyone’s morals, self respect and respect for others. Still, there are riders that are ready to sell their soul to the devil to go faster on the bike...

As I really like the books of Harry Potter, as written by the magical hand of J.K. Rowling, sometimes I see a lot of cycling stories in her writings. More than two weeks ago I was thinking that Ricco was the Voldemort of cycling (he even chose a snake as his nickname...), but now I think he is only the chief of the Death Eaters.

The real Voldemort or dark lord of cycling is the mechanistic doping mentality that affects not only the riders but also certain sport directors and team managers. This mentality leads people to think that they will automatically have victories if they are to secure the skills of riders involved in doping. This mentality to turn riders into machines is firmly established because riders are always told that we will have a certain result if they act in a certain way.

This is a vicious circle that has to be stopped. Well, in fact it is not easy because we live in a mere mechanistic society that bases all the rules on pseudo-scientific experiments.

Cycling is a very beautiful sport, and part of that is because it is unpredictable. Of course you have to train well, recover well, eat well, but when it comes to racing a lot of factors come into play: you have to measure your performance with other riders’ performances, and it also depends on how you react to your breakfast, if the breakaway goes clear, or if you know and like the course...

I think that the mechanistic mentality has nothing to do with cycling, and more in general with life. There are always variables that cannot be taken into consideration...yes, we can predict in a general way what may happen in a race, but the final result cannot be predetermined.

Cycling is doing a lot of things to clean up the sport. We are actually going in the right direction. It is also true that cycling will need some time to extinguish the doping mentality, and that is really a process that cannot be made in a mechanical click of a gear!!

Thanks for reading,
Rubens