December 3/03 9:51 am - Brian Walton, Ontario News, CCES Stories, Tyler Hamilton Foundation

Posted by Editor on 12/3/03
 

Walton Moves On

From Brian Walton:

It is with disappointment and joy that I am announcing my stepping down as Director of Team Snow Valley. The past three years were filled with pride as the blue-green machine developed into one of the best teams in North America. Watching the juniors develop into a nationally recognized "Center for Excellence", the club coming together and pulling off another successful Snow Valley Grand Prix of Bethesda, being named the #1 US amateur team, and witnessing Mike Voigt claim the National Championship victory under perfect team sacrifices are all memories that will stay with me for a lifetime.

The highlight for me was the joy that all team members showed when Mike was the victor. Russ Langley was the first to greet Mike with a big bear hug after his 6th place finish. He was sincerely proud of Mike's victory. Ryan McKinney, who couldn't race due to an achilles injury, was there from the early morning helping me with water bottles, feeding riders and taking pictures. Then there was Mr. Snow Valley, Jon Wirsing sacrificing his wheel and any chances he had of winning the race after Josh Frick had already done so the lap before. A few tears were shed as Mike went on the podium and not just from Mike's Mom and Dad! I realized right then that it was more than a team, but a family. That same pride and kinship was demonstrated by our club members, who though not there physically, kept TSV and the National competition on their minds and heralded the victory to others knowing that by sharing the same team colors, they too, played a part in the victory. Arch McKown has instilled this into the program since he took over as club president back in 1992. His leadership and self sacrifice has helped nurture this program into something very special.

I have been given the opportunity to develop a training center in Philadelphia. Cadence Performance Cycling Center will be located in downtown Manayunk, on Main Street, about a block from the famous "Wall". At Cadence, I will be in charge of the performance side of the business, physiological testing, coaching and training. The training and coaching will be run under the Chris Carmichael training philosophy - CTS (you know, Lance's coach) but I'll give it that personalized Canadian touch!


Ontario Staff for Canada Summer Games and 2004 HP Projects

Applications are now being accepted for staff for the next Canada Summer Games. One male coach, one female coach and a manager are required for the 2005 Team. It will be a two year commitment, with activities in 2004 and 2005, including training sessions, camps, meetings, team selection, and attendance at the Games in Regina in August 2005. You must be fully NCCP certified, and be a level 3 coach by March 2005.

If you are interested in applying for a position, please submit a letter of interest and your coaching resume to the HP Coordinator at racing@ontariocycling.org by December 23, 2003.

The High Performance Committee is also accepting applications for project managers or mentored coaches for all High Performance projects in 2004, including the National Championships. If you would like to work on a project next year, send a letter outlining your interests, what projects you would like to be involved with to the HP Coordinator, at racing@ontariocycling.org. Again, managers must be fully NCCP certified, at least at Level 1.


CCES News

The Canadian Centre for Ethics is Sports distributes articles regarding ethical issue in sport. We occasionally reprint articles that are of interest. Below are three articles, and their original sources.

Italian Cyclist Suspended for Two Years

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MILAN, Italy (AP) -- Cyclist Fabio Testi was suspended for two years Monday, and he and his team were fined a total of $4,500 after he tested positive for banned substances.

The Italian Cycling Federation said in a statement that Testi tested positive for EPT and aminoglutetimide on Aug. 8 during the Giro del Veneto.

He was fined $1,500 and his Mercatone Uno team was given a $3,000 penalty.

Italy's most popular cycling race, the Giro d'Italia, was free of any doping charges this year although previous years have been marred by doping scandals.


Helping the athletes - Campaign to aid Athens competitors

Organization seeking to raise $5 million

RANDY STARKMAN

STAR SPORTS REPORTER

Jane Roos may rival Santa for the amount of mail she's getting.

And the letters directed to her Queen St. E. office are filled with requests, too - for everything from sports equipment to gas cards and groceries.

They've been sent by more than 200 Canadian Olympic hopefuls, all of whom want to be beneficiaries of the See You in Athens fund.

The cash-strapped include most of Canada's top medal contenders for the Summer Olympics - including rowing's world champion eights and fours crews, double world gymnastics medallist Kyle Shewfelt of Calgary, diver Blythe Hartley of Vancouver and world kayak bronze medallist Adam van Koeverden of Oakville.

Roos has raised about $1.7 million for Canadian athletes since 1997, but she is nearing the finish on her most ambitious project to date. It's called The Big Ask, a campaign to raise $5 million that wraps up Thursday.

Roos is a former track and field athlete turned tireless fundraiser whose biggest coup to date was a recent $500,000 donation from MasterCard.

"If you saw some of these applications, it's sad," Roos said. "The net income for many of the athletes is minus $5,000. Some of them, like the men's rowing team, are living six or seven in a house. The parents of one of the Olympians are talking about mortgaging their home.

"Sport is one of the few things that bring an entire country together and when they do do well, we embrace them and we think, 'Wow, they're ours,' and we put the Canada flag right on them and parade them up on Parliament Hill. We need to invest in people who have dreams and want to better themselves."

Roos said the campaign has received donations from Canadians living in London and New York, as well as across the country. Contributions have ranged from a $75,000 cheque from Beachcomber Hot Tubs in Vancouver to the efforts of individuals like Vlad Knope of Toronto, who raised about $2,000 in a door-to-door campaign.

Roos, who says about 85 cents on the dollar goes directly to the athletes, says they're also able to inform people and companies which athlete received their money. The not-for-profit fund also recently received charitable status, and she said that their Web site (www.seeyouinathens.com) issues tax receipts within three minutes of a donation being made.

"People assume it's got to be big dollars," Roos said. "But $25 goes a long way. The whole idea of The Big Ask is to bring 31 million Canadians together. And you'll know who your $25 went to help. How cool would that be? Watching the Olympics and being able to say, 'That's the athlete I gave money to.' "

Among Roos' mementos in her modest east end office is a postcard sent to her by wrestler Daniel Igali one day after he won his gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Igali, who turned down the chance to apply this time because he feels there are other athletes in greater need, received $5,000 from the See You in Sydney fund.

"I am walking on clouds, nothing seems real to me," he wrote. "It is at such times that people like you come to mind. Your 'See You in Sydney' fund was instrumental to my performance."

It was signed "Daniel Igali, Olympic champion!"


Just say yes to pro sports drugs?

By Sandy Grady

USA Today

NEW YORK- The commissioners of Major League Baseball and the National Football League today announced a new "Just Say Yes" policy on drugs.

From now on, they said, players would no longer be tested for drugs. Instead, they would be free to use any drug that enhances their performance, no questions asked.

"This new 'Freedom of Choice' drug policy is for the benefit of our fans," they said in a joint statement. "Our fans deserve the best entertainment on the field and TV screen. If that requires players taking steroids or other drugs, so be it. We're sure spectators, coaches and players will applaud our drug tolerance, which will bring even more excitement to sports."

Critics said the leagues were jolted by a 2004 epidemic of superstars suspended for using drugs. "They can't control it so they're surrendering to the druggies," said a sports lawyer.

The MLB and NFL player unions saluted the "Just Say Yes" policy as leading to more record performances, higher television ratings and larger-than-ever salaries.

OK, it's clearly a fantasy to assume that the pro sports leagues are only a couple of years away from flinging the door wide open for players to use performance-enhancing drugs.

But why not?

After all, who would care?

Certainly not most fans, who don't seem troubled about star athletes artificially blown up with drugs - as long as superfreak hitters keep belting homers on SportsCenter and 320-pound linemen play smash-mouth on Sundays.

Fans and the media went bonkers when Sammy Sosa was caught corking a bat. But drugs? Don't ask, don't tell. Fans shrugged when a mid-November USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll asked what the effect would be if no big leaguers used drugs: 43% said better, 42% said no change, 13% said worse. And a Denver Post survey of younger fans (ages 18-34) - found that they were bothered "little or none at all" by drugs in sports.

Maybe in a culture where we use Viagra to help sex, Prozac to brighten our days and Ritalin to calm our kids - and TV is cluttered with ads for wonder drugs - there's not much outrage if an athlete uses a needle to balloon his biceps. The current investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), which created the new "designer" steroid called tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, doesn't seem to be generating a lot of reaction, even though a Thursday hearing will involve the Giants' Barry Bonds and Yankees' Jason Giambi. And pro football is hardly drug-proof; four players for the Oakland Raiders have been accused of using THG.

Heck, players, even if most were clean, probably would vote for a "Just Say Yes" drug policy. No more threats of suspensions. There would be more 0.250 hitters who'd risk their health to boom a few more taters. Yeah, let the guys with the best pharmacists drive the Rolls-Royces.

And owners? They give lip service to cleaning up sports. Don't tell me they didn't love the attendance jump - and stifle their suspicions - when homer records were trashed in the late 1990s. Only now have baseball's nabobs been embarrassed into tougher drug testing. And experts say it's still a farce.

Face it. Professional sports are rushing toward a time when they'll have to confront the truth: either clamp down hard on performance drugs or admit they're uncontrollable. Go ahead, guys, swallow a pill, stick yourself with a needle; anything for the Grand Old Game.

Selig brags about the tough policing of drugs coming up in 2004. Really? A player has to fail five times before being suspended a year. There's no testing during the off-season, when players bulk up. No wonder Dick Pound of the World Anti-Doping Agency calls baseball's drug gimmick "an insult to the American public."

Are we in the middle of a Steroid Era? My eyes tell me yes. When I covered baseball in the 1960s, baseball players had normal, athletic bodies. When I came back to playoff or World Series games in the 1990s or watch TV, I see outfielders built like NFL linebackers, biceps bulging the size of 500-pound bombs. Bonds was a sleek gazelle with the Pittsburgh Pirates; now, he's a hulking mastodon. Mark McGwire, gulping then-unbanned androstenedione, bloomed into a dreadnought. NFL linemen look like sumo wrestlers in pads. Don't tell me it's all done with Nautilus machines.

And I can see the statistics. It took 122 years of organized baseball until McGwire and Bonds smashed the 70-homer mark. Ten players since 1994 have had 50-homer seasons. I don't believe it's pure living and lousy pitching.

With growth hormones, designer drugs and masking agents, it's going to get harder to catch cheaters. Why not stop the hypocrisy? Just admit pro sports lost the drug war. Take what you want, guys. Pump up those deltoids. As long as fans buy tickets, who cares?

I do. I say it does matter whether pro sports are clean or drug dirty. Here's why:

* You'll never know what's real or fake if you suspect a big percentage of players is on the juice. Spectator sports are built on the belief that the games aren't rigged. Otherwise, switch the dial to pro wrestling.

* The pro drug plague leaches down to high school and college players. Coaches say that's already happening. You think a 180-pound kid lineman won't be tempted to try the same chemicals as Joe Superstar?

* Athletes who think they're immortal are playing Russian roulette with their health by toying with drugs. Experts warn of heart disease and tumors. Ask the friends of former NFL stud Lyle Alzado, who blamed his death from cancer at 43 on steroids.

* Baseball especially is built on nostalgia, sentiment, past greatness. If 21st century homers are propelled by steroids, it makes a mockery of Babe Ruth, who trained on beer and hot dogs. The careers of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle may be laughed away by modern sports junkies.

What next? An icon of a pill and syringe by every record since 1995? Or maybe have two Hall of Fames: one for the old fogies who were clean and another as a Hall of Cheaters?

Yes, the drug epidemic matters. If pro sports don't react hard - real tests, real penalties - the crisis could turn Sosa's corked bat and Pete Rose's gambling into bush-league stuff. And if we learn that the 1998-2003 home-run boom was a Big Lie juiced up by chemicals, baseball may be jolted by a scandal in a class with the Black Sox attempt to fix the 1919 World Series.

Say it ain't so, Bud.

Sandy Grady, a former sports and political columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.


Tyler Hamilton Foundation Kick Off

You are cordially invited to THE PROLOGUE - TheTyler Hamilton Foundation Kick-Off Gala

Join World Class Cyclist and Tour de France hero, Tyler Hamilton as he kicks off his foundation dedicated to providing opportunity and access to individuals with multiple sclerosis and aspiring young cyclists

Thursday, January 8, 2004

5:00 PM - 11:30 PM (Entry time depends on ticket level)

Cyclorama, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

Food, Music, Live & Silent Auction, and Tyler!

Auctioneer: Tom Gross

Music by the Chad Hollister Band

Peloton Tickets $50 7 PM

Green Jersey $100 7 PM - 1 Complimentary drink ticket and Tyler Hamilton Foundation Lapel Pin

Polka Dot Jersey $250 6 PM Limited to 100 - Above benefits plus VIP reception, Tyler Hamilton Baseball Hat, Program Listing, Entry to Podium Raffle, 2 complimentary drink tickets

Yellow Jersey $500 6 PM Limited to 50 - Above benefits plus Wall Recognition Poster, 3 complimentary drink tickets

Podium Tickets $1,000 5 PM Limited to 20 - Above benefits plus exclusive Champagne Reception, Entrance Banner, Photo with Tyler, signed jersey and 4 complimentary drink tickets

To purchase tickets or make a donation go to: www.tylerhamiltonfoundation.org

OR

Send check/money order payable to Tyler Hamilton Foundation, Inc. to:

Tyler Hamilton Foundation, Inc.
3 Pleasant Street
Marblehead, MA 01945

Please provide name, address, phone, email and names of all guests
Questions?

Deirdre Moynihan dintymm@yahoo.com

Joe Tonon 781-990-1486 or joe@insidetracktours.com