Just 11 years have passed since the biggest doping scandal in American sporting history, but the landscape of cycling in the country has been transformed.
While Lance Armstrong has been excommunicated, his former teammates – with hard lessons learned – are quietly populating the peloton with progeny who can put their talents on display without a pervasive culture of doping.
One junior team, EF Education-ONTO, has two riders with familiar surnames – Enzo Hincapie, 15, son of George Hincapie, and Ashlin Barry, 16, son of Dede and Michael Barry. Both young riders have shown enormous potential on the bike and seem destined to follow in their fathers’ footsteps.
Rusty Miller, their moustachioed team leader, was one of many riders who chose integrity over success in the EPO-laden aughts and is firmly convinced that they won’t have to make the same choices their fathers did.
“I don’t think any professional cyclist in the aught woke up and thought, ‘what I want to do is extract my own blood and inject it three months later’,” Miller says when asked the obvious question about his riders’ heritage by Cyclingnews. “Even the guys who did that didn’t enjoy that. And they know that it left both physical and mental scars.
“I’m able to talk to my riders about what it was like in a past era, when there was this drug that made you invincible, and the testing couldn’t catch it. I talk to my riders about the prisoner’s dilemma – if you’re in the aughts, you can’t compete against the guy who’s doping, and the test can’t catch him for doping. What do you do? Do you keep cycling? … I try to teach my riders what a terrible, terrible situation all professional cyclists were in and then pivot them to understanding the fact that they are not in that situation.
“If anyone’s cheating, today, they’re cheating at such tiny marginal effects, that it’s not worth the risk – they’re going to get caught eventually. Whatever marginal effect they can get from cheating is not the same thing that we were facing in the aughts.
“I can tell kids with certainty today, if you go get your butt kicked by another junior, he just trained harder than you did and was better than you were that day. You don’t have to be cynical about your fellow competitors’ performances today.”
History
Miller is cynicism-averse. He raced for a prominent Southeast team in that EPO-filled era but gave up the sport when it became clear that to go any further, he’d have to give up his integrity.
After working at Duke University…
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