The good stage winner

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When 23-year-old Brit Mark Cavendish won Stage 5 of the Tour de France Wednesday for Team Columbia that was great news for the drug-punched sport.

As it was explained to me by several cyclists and team directors when I covered the Tour during the final three years of the Lance Armstrong era, one reason there was seldom very young stage winners at any of the biggest tours or one-day classics was because young riders hadn’t been on teams long enough to benefit from a strict regimen of ‘taking supplements’ or getting ‘B-12 vitamin shots.’

In other words I was being gently advised that riders needed the benefit of ‘special medical treatment’ for several seasons before they were ready to handle the rigors of intense bike racing.

Last year Garmin-Chipotle director Jonathan Vaughters said that a sign of the peloton cleansing itself of drugs would be when relatively unknown young riders began winning races.

Cavendish is that sign. When Team Columbia owner Bob Stapleton cleaned house last year after taking over the disgraced T-Mobile team, he made a point of signing lots of youngsters. Stapleton said he wanted a team filled mostly with riders who brought, as he said, ‘a clean slate.’

Cavendish was one of them. So was 21-year-old Gerald Ciolek of Germany, who is headed to the Olympics (he’s the youngest rider in the Tour).

-- Diane Pucin