Doping falsified everything, Sandy Casar
Sandy Casar of Team FDJ-Big Mat shared his thoughts towards the sports’ biggest controversy and noted that doping has made it pretty difficult to find the real worth of a cyclist.
“We can’t know what might have happened in other circumstances. When a whole team is doped, it can control or block a race, it can pull back breakaways,” Casar said.
“Maybe I sometimes even benefited from their work without knowing it. In effect, everything was falsified. One of the terrible things about doping is that we don’t know who really was good and who wasn’t,” he concluded.
The cyclist marked his professional debut with Team Francaise des Jeux in 2000 and rode with the team through 13 years of his clean professional career.
Some of his career highlights include a second place finish at the Paris-Nice 2002 at an early age of 23 and was expected to be the next France’s prospect for the Tour de France general classifications.
The cyclist managed to bag multiple stages at the three-week race during his 11 participations at the event but failed to secure a podium position throughout his professional career.
He occupied the 11th overall position during the Tour de France 2009 which is still his best performance at the French Grand Tour.
The 33-year-old stated that the new training and hiring processes has made things really straightforward for the cyclists, the competition at the amateur level gives them enough strength to start winning swiftly at the professional level.
“Me, I didn’t have that. At the beginning of my career, I simply thought that I wasn’t up to it. During my first Flèche Wallonne, I took a real kicking”.
Casar was furious when asked about Lance Armstrong’s systematic doping within his former side, Team US Postal and noted that every single cyclist in the sport is bearing the consequences of something done by a handful of riders.
Moreover, Sandy believes that the American and all the other cyclists were probably protected by someone from inside which is why Armstrong managed to clear all the doping tests.
The French noted that UCI has done minimum to catch the culprits and has lost their credibility and it does not matter whether a cyclist is honest or not, it is hard for the fans to believe in the sport any more.
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