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Nineteen Eighty-Three

Brian Cookson, president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), has stated that its newly-minted Cycling Independent Reform Commission (CIRC) will look approximately fifteen years back in time, as it attempts to understand and address cycling’s modern doping dilemma.  This time frame neatly coincides with the low points of the Lance Armstrong era, but the root causes go much deeper than one man.  Fifteen years may help the UCI to pinpoint and investigate the sinister activities and possible collusion that occurred in cycling’s darkest days, but the CIRC must review about thirty years of history to truly understand and fix the corruption that has poisoned the sport, and to bring about lasting reform. The strange, totalitarian world envisioned by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four  might seem like pure fiction, but cycling embarked upon its own “Cold War” and dystopian journey in...