Cycling in the South Bay

Imagine my surprise when I heard a knock on the door last Friday night at 11:00 PM. “Who the fuck could that be?” I asked Mrs. WM, but she kept snoring.

I squinched my eye and looked through the peephole. There was this schlumpfy chick in a white lab coat and some sausage stroker carrying a pail. “Who the fuck are you?” I politely asked, cracking the door enough to speak, but keeping the security chain on.

“USADA. Out of competition drug test. Are you Wank J. Meister?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“USA Cycling racing license number 43903D-FL?”

“Yeah. But I’m a 45+ masters hacker. You got the wrong guy. Lance ain’t here. We broke up years ago.”

“Please open the door and let us in. A refusal to be tested will be recorded as a positive, and you will face disciplinary action, up to and including a two-year suspension.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

They just stood there eyefucking me, so I opened the door. The chick glanced around the apartment. “Vat are zose?”

“These?”

“Ja. Zose.” She pointed to several syringes on the dining table.

“Vitamins. Those are my subcutaneous vitamin injections. For my liver. And to add collagen to my hair. It’s how I keep it so shiny and soft.”

“Fine. Ve’re taking zem for analysis.” With a practiced sweep, she pushed the syringes along with the needles into a little plastic baggie that had a pre-printed number and my name on it. I wondered if she was also going to test the pistachio shells, bread crumbs, and old shrimp heads that fell in as well.

The guy then set the pail on the floor and faced me. “We’re going to need a urine sample, a blood sample, a spit sample, an earwax sample, a lock of hair from your armpit, a snip of fingernail, a swab of toejam, a skin sample from the inside of your cheek, a booger, whatever tartar we can get from the back of one of your molars, and a scraping from the seat of your jockey shorts.”

“Are you drug testers, or product development from Clif Bar? And how do you plan on scraping my underwear? I don’t see no fuckin jackhammer.”

“Very funny. Please urinate into the milkpail.”

Cry me a river, but piss me just a bucket

As I was standing there filling up the bucket, the chick says, “Vat is zis?” She had gone into the kitchen and was nosing around in the pantry. Now she was holding up a can.

“That? That’s nothing.”

“Nussing?”

“I mean, it’s just BlueVeiner Rage D3 Andriosoxylathion Dicarbolmethylalanene.”

“Vas is it for?”

“For? It’s just an anti-oxidant. It’s all natural. It keeps my veins blue and healthy.”

“Fine. I’m confiscating a sample of it. Vas is zis?” She held up another bottle.

“That bottle there? That’s nothing.”

“Does the nussing have a name?”

“Yeah, right there on the side. That’s Bulkmaster Duo-Build Tetrafluoroboratepermanganate with XXXSatans Pitchfork Sodium Monoaluminumditelluride. It’s for my saddle sores. I can show you.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Nein, danke. And zis?”

“That?”

“Ja, zat.”

“That’s Jacknutz Swellnodes Bi-urethane with Conpromium Agnate of Zinchromium. It’s a water softener I put in my water bottles before a race. Hard water makes me cramp and it makes my hemorrhoids swell up like grapefruit. All the guys use it. They sell it by the case at Lindbag Nutrition, for Dog’s sake.”

Aw, heck, it’s just a centrifuge

Pretty soon the Grand Inquisitress came out of the bathroom holding an armful of pill bottles. She had her “You Are In Serious Shit Now, Son” face on. “Do you haf a TUE for any of zese items?”

“A what?”

“TUE. Therapeutic use exemption. Permission from a doctor to use zese medications to treat a known condition, and approved by USA Cycling and ze UCI.”

“Well, uh, sure. Doctor Jose Luis Alvarado de Castandeda-Sinaloa y Michoacan de Sinsemilla prescribed me a whole suitcase load of that stuff when I went down to Mexico last summer. Who can fucking afford health care in California anymore? Those are all for valid illnesses.”

“Super Recovery Testosterone Gel?”

“I’m a recovering alcoholic. That stuff helps me recover quicker after I drink so I can drink again quicker.”

“InstaGrow Chorionic Gonadotropin?”

“I had a cornea transplant. That shit is helping my corneas grow back so I can see better.”

“Third Lung Triple Potency Albuterol?”

“Hey, I’m an asthmatic already. I can hardly breathe without that stuff.” Just then I had a sudden coughing attack.

“Zat is the fakest cough I’ve ever heard,” she said, just being rude. “Okay. Vat about zis? Vat possible use do you haf for a tousand tablets of ‘Ultra Big’ Androstenediol?”

“I got burned and it’s helping with my skin graft.”

“Show me,” she commanded. I held out my pinky where I’d blistered it on the frying pan last week. “Pfffffft,” she said. And it was a rather contemptuous “pffffft,” I might add.

While all this was going on her cohort was digging around in my closet. “Aha!” he yelled. “Found it! Please explain yourself, Mr. Meister!”

“Oh. That?”

“Yes! This!” He was really worked up.

“It’s just a centrifuge. For blood fractionation. Everybody has one of those. I bleed out a couple pints every few months and then zap it with ultraviolet radiation to treat and prevent colds and flu. It is NOT for performance-enhancing purposes or for re-injecting highly oxygenated red blood cells immediately prior to the Cat 4 45+ CBR at Dominguez Hills on Sundays.”

Whatever you do, don’t waken Mrs. WM

Then disaster struck. The two-gallon pail overflowed and began sloshing onto our lime green shag carpet. “Gott in Himmel!” shouted the schlumpfy Überstormführerin.

The shout awoke Mrs. WM, and if there’s one thing she doesn’t like more than being awoken out of a deep, bone-rattling, foundation cracking midnight snore, it’s awakening to find a giant bucket sloshing warm piss onto the carpet.

Of course since she’s Japanese, she was pretty polite about it. “Why have you urinated into a bucket and poured it on the floor?” she asked me.

I pointed at Schlumpfy and Dumpfy. “They made me.”

“We’re very sorry, Ma’am,” said Dumpfy. “It’s part of the USADA out of competition drug testing protocol that we enforce to ensure a level playing field among arthritic old people who do 45-minute crits three or four times a year in hopes of winning $75 dollars or some free GU or, after three years, getting an upgrade based on participation.”

“Ah,” she answered. “Are these the same elderly people who spend $20,000 on their racing equipment, massages, and clothing in order to perhaps win that $75?”

“Well, uh, yes,” said Schlumpfy.

“So what happens if the playing field isn’t ‘level’ as you put it?”

“It will destroy the grass roots of the sport!” they yelled in unison.

“Ah, I see. You mean once they realize that the game is rigged, the non-doping old people will choose not to spend most of their disposable income on expensive toys they can crash on the weekend, and instead take up healthier, family-compatible pursuits?”

“Well, yes.” They were now doodling their toes in the warm piss.

“And the down side to that is…?” More silence. “Surely you two nice young people have something better to do with your Friday nights?”

Schlumpfy was now holding the bucket, and the overflow was drizzling down onto her shoes. Dumpfy was looking glumly at the four-inch concrete chip he’d chiseled out of my Haynes He-Thong Superbriefs. You could tell the thought of analyzing it wasn’t exactly fun.

“Let me make you a nice hot cup of green tea to go with your warm bucket of piss and that small slab of…of…” she trailed off. “Then you can go back to the lab and analyze your, ah, samples. Not that there’s anything wrong…” she stared in disgust at the underwear and the bucket “…with that.”

The next morning I left to meet up with the Donut Ride and when I passed the dumpster I saw the bucket of urine and the centrifuge. Never heard from USADA again. But I’m going to send them a link to the Home Depot ad I saw for four-gallon buckets.

Tagged: out of competition testing, uci, usa cycling, usada

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