T-Mobile Drops Sponsorship

Huge news: Deutsche Telekom AG has dropped its sponsorship of the T-Mobile cycling team. As I wrote earlier when Adidas dropped its sponsorship of T-Mobile, these are dark times for international cycling because the doping scandals offer too much of a liability for any sponsor. Not only would they lose air time from teams having to abandon races if someone gets caught, but they get tainted by implicitly condoning the cheating. As has been written elsewhere, all the governing bodies attacking doping in cycling would never work, since the sponsorship money would still be the big incentive to dope. Now, all the dirty doctors and soigneurs will have to give up their practices as the big money dries up. The governing bodies have only created witch hunts, not caring about their own procedures, and protecting themselves from mistakes, as all bloated bureaucracies end up doing.

This was definitely the case with Iban Mayo, whose B sample tests have come up negative, but the ADA's are lab-shopping to prove a positive. And we saw the mental gymnastics required by the two arbitrators to vote Floyd Landis guilty of doping, when they threw out the results of the first test, but accepted the results of the second test, which would not have been run without a positive in the first case, and had to ignore all the problems with the second test as well.

No, sponsors dropping out is the only way to clean up doping in cycling, and I still have to applaud Tailwind Sports for disbanding when they saw the in-fighting between the governing bodies, the draconian measures the bureaucracies had set up making it almost impossible for athletes to train and ride, and the knee-jerk reactions by race organizers to penalize entire teams (and sponsors) for one person's mistakes.