Opinion: Evans' legs did the anti-doping talking

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Cadel Evans thanks his supporters for one final time(Image credit: Mark Gunter)

Cadel Evans walked away from the peloton in a brilliant way by creating a competitive event that appears as a very useful legacy to the sport of cycling. In a few years' time, the first Tour de France winner, who came from mountain biking and from the Southern Hemisphere, might as well be remembered as the opener of a new era: the post-Lance Armstrong period marred by excessive doping. Interestingly, he has hardly spoken about that. History shows that he was right to do so.

On his visit to the Santos Tour Down Under one week earlier, Greg LeMond asserted that Evans would have won more than one Tour de France had he not been delayed in his rise to power among the top Grand Tour riders by "the dark period" of Lance Armstrong. Questioned by Rupert Guinness for Fairfax Media about this view of his career, the Australian answered: "I don't have any bitter feelings or anything. I came into the sport and the sport was the way it was, and it changed in the period I was in it – and I certainly think it changed for the better and it needed to change. But I couldn't change it single-handedly.

While officials in the early 2000s governed the sport with closer ties to Armstrong and infamous sports director Manolo Saiz than to anti-doping campaigners, a former doper like Jesus Manzano also helped the world to understand what was going on with blood transfusions after the EPO era. But they got burned by the system and the omertà – the code of silence. There was no room for them in the peloton and their careers were cut short. Armstrong's influence as a "bully" remained until he and his accomplice Johan Bruyneel were ousted by USADA in 2012.

Over the years, several journalists have been amazed by Evans' answers when he was questioned about the dopers who obviously stole part of his career. He seemed to not realize that he was a victim. He may not have known everything that happened in his environment but even before he bought his first smartphone and entered the world of tweets, blogs and online reports, he'd read the news. And doping has been an everyday topic in the cycling community since the 19th century, so he couldn’t ignore that doping was a reason for being side-lined inside the Telekom team he rode for in 2003 and 2004.