The original white bicycle scheme had its genesis in what is sometimes called the ‘psychedelic life’ – drug-infused,music-oriented, resistant to the formalities of the “political life”. I first came across it in Richard Neville’s influential book Playpower. Their ‘weak signal’ has now re-surfaced emphatically, with shared city bike schemes being introduced across Europe and North America (Velib is only the largest of many). They are mostly still at the early stages of development, but seem certain to grow as electronic access and permission technologies become more sophisticated, and local and national governments become more concerned about climate change, fossil fuel dependency, and local resilience.

Indeed, I first wrote a draft of this post last year, when I visited the Dutch Hoge Veluwe National Park near Arnhem (you pick up and drop off the bicycles, all painted white, from six locations around the park) where they benefit from controlled access in and out of the park, revenues (from entry fees) to manage and maintain the bike fleet, and a distinctive design which makes the bicycles noticed instantly outside of the park walls.

When I train people in futures work, I sometimes talk about entrepreneurship or social innovation as being a bet on how the trends will turn out. In fact it’s more complex than this, because success depends on five or six different elements being aligned. Even failures can get three or four elements right, but miss out on the fifth one; it’s not so much a single bet, as an accumulator. But culturally we still tend to think of failure as an absolute, rather than as a set of clues to the future.

But this is not just about innovation, or the forty year gap from the initial idea to the edge of the mainstream. The underlying politics, and political history, are important too. In the strands of the radical ’60s, the “political life” was rooted in the traditional labour movement politics, ranging from communist to social democratic: it was about the politics of production. The “psychedelic life”, in contrast, always more playful, was a reaction to the burgeoning consumerism of the ’50s and the ’60s. It was influenced by the Situationists, and tried to construct a politics of consumption. The two strands didn’t always speaks the same language: the activist and writer John Hoyland has described an exchange of letters between members of the editorial group  of the magazine Black Dwarf (labour wing) and John Lennon (more at the psychedelic end of the spectrum).

They [the letters] summed up a tension between two tendencies in the counterculture – the hippy strand that had come to the fore in the mid-60s and embraced self-expression, spirituality and “love”, and the leftwing radicalism that was sweeping the world in 1968 and was concerned with changing structures.

We know now, of course, that both failed; we got thirty years of acquisitive individualism instead. The proportion of the unionised workforce has fallen to around a quarter, at least in the UK, and consumption is eating into our “natural” (or environmental) capital. The introduction of shared bike schemes can sometimes seem to be only about transport. But the resurgence of the white bicycles is perhaps a harbinger of a new politics that seeks to challenge consumerism or consumption. If we really do have less than a hundred months to change our behaviour in the face of climate change, as some activists suggest, we need such a politics urgently.

As I’ve said before on this blog, I’m a fan of the sport, despite the fact that it has probably been as deeply immersed in a culture of perfromance-enhancing drugs as any other sport. During the most recent Tour de France, about half a dozen riders failed drugs tests and were both despatched from the Tour and fired by their teams.

Some of them, including the young Italian climber Ricardo Ricco, winner of stages in both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France, thought they were taking a version of the blood enhancing drug EPO, called CERA, which was so recent that it was undetectable by the tests. Indeed, the very aspects of CERA which make it a boon for patients (it can be applied far less often because it releases slowly into the bloodstream) should also have made it harder to detect in tests,

So what do we learn from all of this? First, that the Tour de France organisation, ASO, went into the Tour with a clear agreement with all the teams. They got to take part only by signing up to a tough anti-doping position. (Astana, the team for which the 2007 winner Alberto Contador now rides, was excluded because of concerns about their pervious history).

The second is that if you’re a professional cyclist, your blood profile (“biological passport“) is no longer your private property. Profiles of all risers, maintained over time, anble investigators to see anomalies. It’s thought that some of the riders who tested positive, including Ricco and Lance Armstrong’s former lieutenant Manuel Beltran, were targeted for tests because of incosistencies in the profile.

The third is that co-operation with Roche, the manufacturers of the products used for doping is essential – which is why CERA was detectable.

And the fourth is that it remains an inexact science: Ricco said later that he’d been tested around ten times while using CERA, but only two had produced a positive test.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising. The whole machinery of drugs testing is still very young. The World Anti-Doping Agency was founded only in 1999, its code implemented by sports organisations only in 2004. David Millar, the British cyclist who was banned for two years for EPO use, and is now a co-owner of Slipstream/Garmin/Chipotle, which is committed to clean cycling, put it this way:

“What everybody really forgets is that the anti-doping world is so young. WADA has only existed nine years, and the online whereabouts system was only put online this year.”

Slipstream, along with CSC (the team of the winner Carlos Sastre) and Team Columbia (previously Team High Road, the home of the young British sprint star Mark Cavendish) have implemented regular private testing to make sure that they are clean and seen to be clean. (CSC’s anti-doping programme report can be found here, in pdf). Slipstream also requires its riders to be trackable at all times via GPS. (A cyclist who wants to be seen to be clean has to kiss their privacy goodbye). It’s also addressed the problem at a third level, by having the whole team based in one location, Gerona in Spain, during the racing season rather than being scattered across Europe. This reduces the likelihood, and temptation, of riders being exposed to outside influences.

The final element, as far as cycling is concerned, is the response of the sponsors. Barloworld and Saunier-Duval, which both had riders expelled from the Tour for drug use, each announced almost immediately that they were pulling out of sponsoring the sport. Being associated with drugs use isn’t good for the corporate image. This should increase peer pressure on riders not to use drugs, although there’s an interesting conflict here between the “common good” of a clean sport and the “private interest” of a rider seeking to improve their marketabilioty through better performances.

From the perspective of the Olympics, it’s easy to believe that athletes – and their countries – would rather turn a blind eye to drugs use if it means winning medals. So perhaps one of the most encouraging elements of the ‘Dwain Chambers affair’ and Chambers’ unsuccessful legal battle to be allowed to compete for the team despite his previous drugs-related ban, was the utter disdain for Chambers expressed by most of his fellow athletes.

The cycling one-hour record is simple enough, at least in theory: you cycle around a banked track as fast as you can for an hour. It’s been held by many of the greats: Coppi, Moser, Anquetil, Mercx, Indurain. In 1996, the British rider Chris Boardman took the record with a ride of 56.375km.

But cycling’s governing body, the UCI, then decided that technology was helping the riders too much – so they ‘froze’ Boardman’s record and introduced a ‘new’ record, the ‘athlete’s hour’, which required that the cyclist used the same technology that could have been used by Eddie Mercx when he broke the hour record in 1972. The result, so far, has been that record attempts are made only by time trial specialists such as Hutchinson and the current holder of the ‘athlete’s hour’, the Czech rider Ondrej Sosenko.

Hutchinson makes some interesting points about this. The first is that the UCI has effectively removed the glamour from the record by their insistence on ’70s technology – and the use of technology is part of that glamour. As he writes, “The hour record used to be a showcase for the most cutting edge technology. When Mercx set his record, the magazines and newspapers devoted pages to the technological marvel that he was riding … It’s as though the athletics authrities decreed that the mile record had to be set on a cinder track with leather running shoes”.

One of the issues is that a lot of money in the sport comes from equiipment sponsors – who are inevitably less interested in ‘retro’ technology. Some of the restrictions are absurd; Hutchinson ended up arguing with officials about whether Mercx could have used a digital watch – and if not whether it would have made any difference.

And even within the UCI’s constraints, technology comes into play. Sosenko, it’s said, used an unusually heavy back wheel – which on a track would have created some of the benefits of the disc wheels time-triallists use. Hutchinson suggests it’s simply not possible to take technology out of a sport that’s always used it.

The French study on performance improvement – conducted at Irmes, the national biomedical and epidemiological institute of sport, analysed more than 3,000 records going back over the the last century to the 1896 Olmpics. It concludes that performances are now so close to physiological limts that the notion of record breaking has only half a century to go. No new records, not just in athletics but in all quantifiable sports, by 2060 (a splendidly precise prediction!). The head of Irmes, Jean-Francois Toussaint, explains the research like this:

“We could see there was a common pattern for all the events we analysed and that our mathematical model is able to predict the development of world records. It is extremely accurate when correlated to world record values throughout the Olympic era… We started our study in 1896, when we estimate people were operating at 75% of their physiological capacity. We are now at 99%. When we say there will be no more world records after 2060, it should not be forgotten that in about half of the events, there will be no world records after 2027.”

The question is: do records matter? In boxing, there are no records, just competitions. The Tour de France is run over a different course every year but it is still an achievement to win. If it does, it will make the technology, whether equipment or tracks and infrastructure, more important than ever.

The worst year for the Tour was undoubtedly in 1998, when police raided the Festina team following a customes intercept of drugs intended for use by the cyclists. (The story is told in Willy Voet’s Breaking The Chain). Last year a number of favourites – including Basso, Ulrich and others – were excluded because they had been linked to a Spanish blood doping investigation, Operation Puerto. Basso, who had recently won the Giro in a towering performance, later admitted an involvement; Ulrich remains in denial, but has retired. Even so, the outcome of the 2006 Tour remains inconclusive because the ‘winner’, Floyd Landis, tested positive for testosterone following a blistering mountain attack whhich put him in a position to win the race – and the case grinds through the agencies responsible for resolving it a year later.

On that score, then, this year is better. Two people have failed drugs tests (Moreni of Cofidis is the other), and they and their teams have left the Tour immediately, without waiting for the ‘B’ sample to be tested. T-mobile seemed lucky to survive, but perhaps did so because their rider, Patrick Sinkewitz, had tested positive prior to the Tour, not during it. And he had already abandoned the tour as a result of injury before news of his positive test result was confirmed. But Sinkiewitz’s positive was enough for German television to suspend coverage of the race.

The tests seem to be working better, and the Tour management’s response has been decisive – and by escorting whole teams out of the race, designed to put peer pressure on riders who dope.

And Rabobank have this evening chosen to sack Michael Rasmussen and pull him from the race, while he was wearing the leader’s yellow jersey and a strong certainty to win in Paris, after it became clear that he misled them about his whereabouts. (Rasmussen has never failed a drugs test). Again, in previous years, this would have been one of those murky stories which circulated as rumours but the team was able to cover up.

It’s also the case that we’re getting better at reading the signs. Because cycling is relatively technical, riders have a fair idea of the power output they and their rivals are achieving. If it seem too good to be true, then it probably is. Basso’s climbing performances at last year’s Giro were called into question – just on the basis of what they implied about his power output – almost immediately by another coach. Even as Vinokurov was winning his mountain stage on Monday, contributors to the ITV Tour Forum were casting suspicion on it.

But given where the sport has come from, such sharp cultural change will take time to work its way through. And such change is always uneven. My own instinct is that any rider over thirty came into the sport at a time when there was pressure on riders to use drugs to get results, as the once-banned, now reformed David Millar has argued. This doesn’t mean that they are all taking drugs, of course, but that they’ll take longer to understand that the culture of the sport has changed. The UCI and national federations need to make sure that their ‘whereabouts systems’ actually work properly. Teams should follow the example of Team CSC and post all their riders’ blood profile data online (a kind of ‘open source’ public monitoring) even while allowing for the irony that this pioneering transparent system was implemented by a former Tour winner, Bjarn Riis, who’s due to be stripped of his title after admitting using the blood booster EPO.

My best guess here is that the sport will clean itself up as the younger riders come through, as long as the Tour – and other races – continue to take a tough line on doping. The question is whether it will do that faster than sponsors decide that being associated with the sport is bad for their reputation – or at least worse for their reputation than the benefits they gain from marketing and so on.

The wider story, of course, is that there is too much at stake in sport, because there is too much money to be made from it, and that we therefore take it too seriously, as Mike Marqusee has argued. Of course the temptation will be to cheat if you think you can get away with it; think of Flo-Jo, the American athlete whose times improved miraculously, won gold medals at the ’88 Olympics, and died very young of a heart attack.

Meanwhile, there are some double standards going on here. On the eve of the British Open Gary Player made some pretty strong allegations about drug use in golf, which were met by the same kind of denial-type flannel as drugs allegations did in cycling ten or fifteen years ago. But perhaps that’s because golf isn’t a proper sport.