Baseball and cycling are about as different as two sports can be. One is as American as hot dogs and apple pie and a certain brand of truck. The other gets attention in the United States only if an American is wearing the maillot jaune on the Champs-Elysees.

Despite their differences, each has come to a crossroads after a decade or more of rampant performance-enhancing drug use among some of its top performers.

While baseball has been slow to address the alleged steroid-induced home run surge of the past decade, cycling has undergone numerous acts of self-cleansing to divest the dopers.

And while suspected steroids user Barry Bonds is alternately celebrated and vilified as he inches closer to Hank Aaron's hallowed career home run record, cycling is getting mostly bad press for purging itself of its top riders.

The recent two-year suspension of Giro d'Italia champion and perennial Tour de France contender Ivan Basso was the latest in a long line of sordid headlines.

Perhaps because few of its stars have been busted for drugs, baseball has maintained much of its wholesome American appeal, whereas cycling looks dirtier than some of Tony Soprano's business ventures. And as the home to a major league baseball team as well as many of the country's best professional cyclists, it's as apparent in Colorado as anywhere in the United States.

"I think cycling is to a point now where the only way out of the tunnel is to go straight through it," said Jonathan Vaughters, director of the Boulder-based Slipstream Sports-Chipotle cycling team.

"There's no possibility of a cosmetic fix anymore, and that's good. Everyone is finding out what happened behind closed doors for the past 10 years when everything looked bright and rosy. In a weird sort of way, it's the best thing that could have happened."

A new approach
Vaughters is a Denver resident and former Tour de France teammate of Lance Armstrong, whose name has come up in recent reports that connect Armstrong and Floyd Landis to blood doping.

Despite the bad headlines and his own brush with cycling's dirty side — he has witnessed the doping problems in Europe but denies ever using performance-enhancing drugs — Vaughters is passionate about the future of the sport and the notion it can thrive with clean athletes.

Using a start-from-scratch mentality, he has stocked the Slipstream team with mostly up-and-coming, young riders rather than experienced, possibly compromised, pros. And he has initiated an ambitious program in which athletes are independently tested regularly by the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE), a Los Angeles-based organization created last fall to foster clean cycling.

Five months and 600 clean tests later, the new protocol is being lauded as a small but significant step in helping the sport rid itself of its dirty past.

In addition to being a deterrent to doping, Vaughters says the testing program — it will cost his team about $400,000 this year - is a business model that already is drawing more sponsorship by restoring faith in the sport among potential corporate backers.

He's hoping the transparency of the team's drug-test policy and its 2007 success in domestic and midlevel European races will earn it a wild-card slot in next year's Tour de France.

The ACE testing doesn't specifically look for doping products but for changes in biochemistry that might raise concern. Test results are not divulged to USA Cycling, the International Cycling Union (UCI) or anti- doping agencies, but ACE co-founder Dr. Paul Strauss said, even for an inconclusive abnormality, there are actions a team needs to take to maintain the relationship with ACE.

"Having the sport's governing body act as a police force is only part of the solution," Strauss said. "What we do is allow the teams and the athletes and the sponsors to take responsibility for their own actions and promote clean sport. We give them the tools and resources to do that, and it allows them to make a statement, too."

Whether at home or on the road, Slipstream athletes give one vile of blood and one vile of urine at Quest Diagnostic centers almost every week. Ten of Slipstream's 23 riders live along the Front Range, including Brighton's Jason Donald, who said he has been tested 17 times since February — 15 by ACE and twice at races.

European Pro Tour teams CSC and T-Mobile also have started independently testing their own athletes in the past year, but neither is as stringent as Slipstream's program.

"To get stuck by a needle every week is a pain," said Donald, who finished second in the prologue and 50th overall at the eight-day, 700-mile Tour of California in February. "If it's what we have to do to move the sport to a more clean way of competing, then that's what we're going to do. I consider it very worthwhile and a small price to pay for what the end result will be."

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