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Jacked Up

By Shawn Rohrbach

Author’s note: In light of the recent decision by the Justice Department to cease their investigation into organized promotion of doping in professional cycling, I am repeating this essay. I have revised the last paragraph.

I wonder if they will ever make an effective performance enhancing drug for writers. For generations, writers have claimed strong drink, LSD, pot, Absinth, or a number of other mind altering substances free the mind and enable them to reach out to some distant dimension  and bring back words and ideas  so profound they redefine literature.  I don’t know about that; those don’t work for me. I tried the strong drink for a while, not to enhance my writing, but to stop feeling and  that didn’t last long since  I cannot afford the top shelf brands and drank the cheap swill diluted with chemicals, resulting in bad dreams and hangovers.

I met a professional cyclist during the research phase for my novel “Cast the First Stone”.  He raced then at an elite level against the famous names we all saw in the Tour de France and other major races.  He was in his late twenties; average height for a cyclist, slim to the point of looking anorexic and at that time had won some domestic races but had never won any of the European majors.  Without apology, he talked about why he used performance enhancing drugs.  He excelled at all local races, began to develop a recognizable name for himself nationally, and even caught the attention of two European based cycling teams and was considered to have some of the most potential for his generation of professional cyclists.  He was enjoying some revenue from two modest endorsement contracts.  He admitted it was the drugs. He said it with a smile.

The real money in professional cycling is, of course, in the endorsements and these deals can grow larger with multiples victories.  Corporations who pen these endorsement contracts claim to support clean sports, but we know the reality; victory does not come easily in a highly competitive field and performance enhancing drugs give many athletes the slight edge they need to achieve victory, and subsequently the lucrative endorsements.  Wink wink.

I talked to the father of a fifteen year old boy at a junior race and dad was giving energetic advice to son while everyone was waiting for the race to start.   I made a comment on how much more determined his son appeared than the others in the race.  He was silent, focused and did not share in any of the banter at the start line.  Dad just smiled at me and said, “He’s going to win, he always does.  I make sure of it.”  I was curious and asked what he did to motivate his young boy to such lofty ideals as winning all of the time.  His look was condescending and damning at the same time.  It was obvious I was asking the wrong question and prying where I did not belong.  He did manage to spit out something like, “I am a doctor, I know what my son needs.”  I am not sure exactly what that meant.

I interviewed several more competitive cyclists, mostly amateur men who competed in small, unknown local races, who freely admitted they used performance enhancing drugs to win.   I did not focus on their method, but rather their rationale.  To the person, the interview experience was the same; every one of these cyclists was ill at ease, abrasive, defensive and narcissistic.  I did not enjoy any one of the interviews and in fact grew so disgusted with three cyclists, I abruptly ended the conversations.  I see so much literature about doping focusing on the method and I now know how much easier it is to talk to a medical professional about method and potential harm than it is to talk to the fraud who uses.

After completing most of these interviews I set the novel aside and planned on abandoning it.  I am not a writer who enjoys technical analysis; I think people are far more interesting than weapons or rocks.  I like evil but loveable characters and heroes who have personal flaws.  I interviewed a murderer once and actually had some empathy for him. But I despised the frauds.  They are mostly healthy middle and upper middle class white males who, as teenage boys, had the family resources to buy three thousand dollar bicycles, slick racing style clothing and two hundred dollar shoes.  They travelled to resorts and beautiful locations to train and then to race.  They could focus time and energy on an expensive albeit healthy pursuit, bicycle racing, and I was sitting across the table from them as they rationalized cheating.  I even gave up cycling for a time.  I focused instead on my book ‘Open Your Heart with Bicycling…” and interviewed people who do not cheat.  That helped excite me about cycling again.

After a couple of years, I went back to the manuscript and finished the interviews.  This time I focused on cyclists who had quit doping. I was hoping to find some genuine remorse and did so in a few older men who had stopped racing, and doping.  These interviews, however, were usually laced with a healthy dose of “God lifted me out of my wretched life and saved me, and I am trying to get my self published book made into a movie.”

I no longer follow competitive cycling knowing full well many if not most of the cyclists are doping.  I liken it to “professional” wrestling, which I watch occasionally for amusement and certainly not with any serious intent to follow the “sport”.  I am waiting for the two sports, if we can call them that, to merge, and then hopefully we will see speedo clad wrestlers chasing spandex clad cyclists with metal chairs at random points along the race route. Maybe a few “professional” baseball players can hold a home run contest as a side show to the Tour de France.  It will all be a lot of amusing fun because we will know everyone is jacked up.