Conflicting viewpoints

In extracts from his forthcoming autobiography (the second) Mark Cavendish establishes that he against a potential Truth and Reconciliation commission.

"The problem is getting people to open up about their past when there's no incentive. After the USADA verdict and amid the hysteria that it created, there was talk of a 'Truth and Reconciliation' commission. It sounds like a nice idea, but it's not going to work. Why? One word: ego. Even now, when they've retired and there's no threat of sanctions or public humiliation, riders cling to their careers because that's what their identity has been constructed on. They're terrified of losing it all," read a part of the biography, published by the Telegraph.

"So what do we do with the skeletons in cycling's closet? Mine might not be a popular view, but sometimes I wonder why we insist on rattling them around and whether the time hasn't come to simply concentrate on the present. To me, it's gone far beyond the point where the soul-searching has become useful to the sport."

Cavendish compares cycling to tennis, and reflected on the disparity between the two sports:

"My other persistent frustration is the discrepancy between our sport and others. Take tennis. Five years after the UCI, the International Tennis Federation finally got its biological passport up and running in 2013. In 2011, a grand total of 21 out-of competition blood tests were carried out in tennis, as against the 4,613 in cycling," he wrote.

"You consider this, then you hear Andre Agassi saying that 'tennis has always led the way in anti-doping' or Marion Bartoli insisting that 'doping doesn't exist in tennis'. I don't want to pick on one sport in the way that others have singled out cycling, but how can she be so confident when, over more than a decade, Lance alone sailed through hundreds of tests? The problem with statements like Agassi's and Bartoli's is that they perpetuate the narrative that the public has been hearing for years - that cycling is riddled with doping and other sports are clean."

"Again, I'm loath to pick on tennis, but the discrepancy was brought home to me again when I heard Tim Henman matter-of-factly answering a question about players recovering after five-set matches and explaining that they would just use an intravenous drip. Perfectly fine, perfectly legal in that sport, but strictly forbidden for us."

"Even so, I welcome the needle ban: anything to ensure that the doping plague that had taken a grip of cycling doesn't return; and anything to hopefully make people realise that we're light years ahead of other sports in the war on drugs."

Cavendish calls a spade a spade, but the question is if his statements are really that thought-provoking.

In essence, he is calling for cycling’s doping discussion to be swept back underneath the carpet, while bashing another sport for not lifting said carpet.