"A Dog in a Hat"

I just finished reading Joe Parkin’s book "A Dog in a Hat". I would not recommend this book for the casual or average American cycling fan. It would be too easy for them to get wrapped up in the drug aspect of the book. However, to the “riders” this book is an eye opening account of life in the European peloton. Someone who is used to being in the saddle can appreciate the hard work, sacrifice, and team work it takes to be successful in road racing. Joe’s stories and accounts are very detailed and are fascinating. I will have to plan a trip to visit Belgium to ride and maybe watch a kermis or two. The Belgium beer would be an added bonus of course!

Whenever there is big money involved people will do what ever takes to get an edge: “Imagine someone telling you that by taking a certain drug you could win a single event and be three times richer, famous for life in your country---and it won’t hurt anyone. What would you say? There’s a wide range of ethics among riders.”---Ned Overend

You have to realize that in Europe cyclists can achieve rock star status. In Joe’s book he describes getting his picture taken for his “Hero” card, Europe’s equivalent of a baseball card. European cyclists are plenty due to the popularity of the sport. Riders that are successful are neighborhood heroes, the same as our local high school athletes making the pros and performing well.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not condone cheating in any form. I would never put drugs in my body to gain an advantage. Now some new fangled supplement, sign me up. Back in my triathlon days I lived in Chico and trained with the Chico Velo. One year one of the riders hooked up with some company to test a new supplement for his master’s thesis on sports nutrition. I volunteered because they were testing VO2 max and such. In those days all the magazines and articles were telling us age groupers that this was the best way to judge fitness, hence performance. The study was supposed to be a double blind study, but we knew almost instantly which was the real thing and which was the placebo. Did it improve our performance? I can’t answer that as I was not privy to the numbers, but I can tell you when we were taking, get this, the grape seed extract, we recovered faster, trained more often, and we felt great most of the time. I don’t know what ever happened with the product. The whole thing just sort of disappeared because the testers and the subjects could tell which one was the placebo.

In his book Joe called himself “a consciences objector”. This shows that the entire peloton is not on something. No one complains because of what Joe calls “the lycra wall”. Endurance athletes (any cyclist that races the classics are some of the world’s best endurance athletes) do not need muscle mass as say baseball or American football athletes. To put it simply they need red blood cells to carry oxygen to their muscles. This is where blood doping comes in. With steroids it is obvious to the naked eye when someone is using due to the rapid massive gain in muscle mass. EPO and other forms of blood enhancement are not so obvious. Can there ever be a level playing field? Who knows? I will say that cheaters will always find a way to cheat, but in the morning they still have to look in the mirror.

In my opinion the truly gifted athletes are the ones that are winning and performing well on a consistent basis. The cheaters are fly by night because; well they suck and have to cheat. Our sport is a great sport with athletes that perform well because they spend hours in the saddle, not minutes in the doctor’s office. There is a bumper sticker out there for Ironman triathletes that reads “So you did a marathon, that’s cute”. The riders of the classics and grand tours could say the same thing about the Ironman!!!