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Sit down, City fans. Let me tell you what it was like to be an American cycling fan after Lance
Where were you for Oprah?
I was at the Tour Down Under. With the time change, it was Friday, January 18, 2013. Around lunch. I was in the press room, and we gathered around an iPhone as the man everyone in that room knew had been lying to us for years finally told somebody the truth.
I was never a Lance Guy. But I knew plenty of Lance Guys. I have friends who were Lance Guys, maybe even still are. Back then, Lance Guys were absolutely everywhere, easily identifiable by their yellow wristbands.
They were everywhere despite being warned, repeatedly. David Walsh warned them early and often. _L'Équipe_ warned them. USADA's Reasoned Decision warned them in no uncertain terms just months before Oprah. Most remained Lance Guys.
That's because if you squinted, you could still believe him. He'd never failed a test (that we knew of then). He'd sued Walsh and the _Sunday Times,_ winning a £300,000 judgment in 2006 – post-Oprah, the _Sunday Times_ launched its own legal bid to recover that money, plus costs, which resulted in a "mutually acceptable" confidential settlement. He'd denied it all under oath. He called USADA's case an "unconstitutional witch hunt." Lance Guys squinted very, very hard. Then on that day in January, Oprah leaned forward in her chair and opened everyone's eyes.
"Yes or no," she asked. "Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?"
"Yes," Lance said. And one word did what, for many, 164 pages of Reasoned Decision (not including appendices) couldn't.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Lance ran it the other way around: Trust what you see, and only what you see. Look at the jerseys on his wall. Ignore the papers, those liars. I was reminded of this tactic this week as I watched a football club in Manchester, England do the same thing. The controversy unfolding in English football is one of the largest, by sheer financial scale, in the history of any sport. These are moments where you learn quite a lot about human nature, and where two very different sports tie themselves together.
If you don't follow football, you may have missed all of this. That's fine, I'll get you caught up. The backstory is important because Manchester City fans are about to go through something American cycling fans of a certain era know all about: being the punchline. Having a complicated relationship with your own fandom. Being wrong, in very public ways. Deciding whether to acknowledge how wrong you've been. And then turning up for your sport anyway, because nobody can ruin that for you.
The short version: Manchester City is the most successful English football club of the last 15 or so years. In 2008, the club was acquired by Abu Dhabi United Group, an investment vehicle of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nayhan, the UAE's deputy Prime Minister and a member of its ruling family. (One of his brothers, Tahnoun, is said to be the power behind the UAE Team Emirates-XRG cycling team.) In the years since Sheikh Mansour acquired the team, City has won eight Premier League titles (a big deal), four FA Cups (medium deal), seven League Cups (the Teams Classification of football), and in 2023, the biggest club prize in Europe: the Champions League.
They've been very good, largely because they've been very rich. Cycling fans will be familiar with the concept.
Football has spending rules, unlike cycling. They're not spending caps, per se, but rather loss caps. The Premier League limits how much money a club can lose. The idea is that clubs have to spend roughly what they earn, so a rich owner (like a Sheikh, for example) can't just write lots of big checks and win everything.
One way around the cap, therefore, is to have more revenue, which decreases losses. So, according to the Premier League, City pretended a bunch of big checks from its owners were actually sponsorship revenue. It was brazen, and effective. The financial equivalent of hanging a bunch of blood bags in the back of your team bus. And they got caught.
Last Thursday, after a three-and-a-half year investigation, plus a 42-day hearing, an independent commission found the club guilty of 114 of the 115 charges leveled against it. Over nine seasons, ending 2018, the club reported £949.4 million in revenue from sponsors. The commission found that only £119.2 million was actually from sponsors. The rest came from the owners, routed via what the commission called a "disguised funding scheme." Sham companies, sham payments, shams everywhere. Like an episode of Scooby Doo where each new unmasking of the villain just shows the same guy from Abu Dhabi underneath.
The punishment hasn't been decided yet. It could be a fine, a points deduction, or relegation, which means being dropped to the division below. Picture winning the Tour de France and then getting told that you're only allowed to race the Tour of Poland next year.
City say they're "innocent of all the accusations" and hold "a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence." They'll appeal. It's the modern playbook: never admit, never apologize. Don't expect anyone to sit down across from Oprah.
So, City fans. Pull up a chair. Grab a snack. There's coffee in the back. Let's talk about falls.
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