A Newsman with a View
I read Cyclingnews.com every morning. A cup of coffee, a muffin, and that site starts things off right for me.
I know I'm not alone among Slowtwitchers. We're obviously a bunch of cycling fans, because when we're not Slowtwitching we run across to Cyclingnews.com and Competitor.com (where, among other publications, the august Velonews is hosted). When I run a report on Slowtwitch "outbound links" those two sites almost always sit first and second.
I was over at Cyclingnews, reading Tour coverage, and I saw an ad for Cenegenics. You've seen the ads, either on Cyclingnews or on other sites or on TV.
If you're unfamiliar with Cenegenics you can see and hear the 72-year-old Dr. Jeffrey Life—his body of Adonis is featured in those ads—in a short video, where he describes what he terms hormonal optimization. You can also read the transcript of the 60 Minutes report on anti-aging and Cenegenics.
Cenegenics is a chain of anti-aging centers across America. I have no problem with these centers, per se. To each his own. They're not for me. At least, not yet. The older I get, the less I know for sure. (When I was 25, I was certain about a lot of things.) So, maybe my thinking will evolve in 10 or 20 years—if I live that long after having eschewed hormonal optimization.
But, that's me. What my neighbor does is his business.
What bothers me is the nexus of anti-aging advertising with an affinity group that races bicycles and triathlons. Hormonal optimization is no problem, if you spectate endurance sports. But it is, by definition, cheating if you engage in [the national governing body sanctioned versions of] these sports, as do so many readers of Slowtwitch and Cyclingnews. This, absent a very hard-to-get TUE for the sorts of hormones an anti-aging clinic is going to help you optimize.
Or, unless we all throw off a set of rules we've all been living under for a few generations.
If a Cyclingnewser is similar to a Slowtwitcher, the ven diagram intersection between its readers and the typical, non-racing, anti-aging clinic customer is—my guess—pretty small. Rather, I consider the ad a temptation unhelpful in the fight for anti-doping in sport.
Gentlemen's clubs should have the right to advertise. But wouldn't an ad for a gentlemen's club placed in a church bulletin be in poor taste? It's like that.
The poignancy of the disconnect was made apparent on a thread on our reader forum a month ago, when a reader noted the Cenegenics ad appearing adjacent to an interview with one of Slowtwitch's favorite cycling personalities, Cervelo's Gerard Vroomen. The Cyclingnews interview, pithily called, A Vroomen with a View centered on the Cervelo co-founder's opinions on the anti-doping fight. The interviewer asks Vroomen where the sport is falling down in its effort to combat doping.
"I don't get the sense that there's a grand plan," Vroomen answers, "The UCI is doing its thing, the teams are doing theirs, some race organisers are taking some steps…"
Certainly the media has a part to play in the anti-doping effort also. Certainly we have obligations as stakeholders in the grand plan. Allowing the service of an ad advocating for hormonal optimization on the same page as an interview on anti-doping cannot be part of that plan.
"All those," calculated Bogie in the Maltese Falcon, "are on one side… and what have we got on the other side?"
Here's what's on the other side. I'm frankly nervous about calling any media company to task over the ads it carries. I don't know who the best arbiter is for determining ad appropriateness for websites-not-your-own, but I do know I'm not that man.
Further, it appears to me that Cyclingnews didn't sell that ad, rather it seems to be served via a third party aggregator, or remnant broker. I have some experience doing business with these entities. You never know what's going to serve on your site.
Still, when a third-party-served ad would display what I knew was offensive to our readers, I would contact the ad aggregator and demand the ad be pulled out of our rotation, so that our readers did not have to see that ad. And the ad was always pulled.
But herding non-conforming ads was like herding cats and I have some sympathy for any site publisher that does business with third-party ad sellers. Finally, at the end of last year we pulled the plug and we do not sell our remnant space to anyone.
I'm not about to tell the publisher of Cyclingnews, or anyone else, how to run his business. Just, I think, in this one narrow case, Cyclingnews could do better. Accordingly, here is my official request, as an ardent Cyclingnews consumer, for that ad to be pulled.
What will be my response, as a reader, if I continue to see on Cyclingnews an ad which so offends me? My response will be to tune in, every morning, and read the expert live coverage that serves as the model for the coverage I hope to emulate when we perform the same service at triathlons around North America. I will read James Huang's expert tech editorial. I will pore over the unparalleled photography. I will make my coffee, sit down in front of my computer, and avail myself of one of the very best websites I know. Cyclingnews does so many things right that the scales are heavily weighted in favor of that fine title.
Nevertheless, if we in the media believe we have constructive roles to play in the sports that afford us our incomes, we are not just reporters, we are not just onlookers and bystanders. We have to haul our own water and cut our own firewood.
