We sit on the roof of the concrete hotel and watch a city power down. It’s 11 p.m. in Bentiu—no running water, no electricity that isn’t derived from a diesel generator. One by one, the homes and hotels are quieted, until the city is silent. We lean back in our creaking plastic chairs and stare into the heavens.
I spent the day sitting in a Toyota Land Cruiser with Kevin, a Lost Boy named James Adiok Mayik, a driver and an armed guard. Before leaving the city, we made a stop to profess our fealty to the region’s head of security, a wide, genial man who assured us that everything was “normal” in Unity State, and that we were free to travel. Bentiu tapered out into swampland, which tapered back into the satellite town of Rubkona, a fetid stretch of tents and shacks that spoke of an oil town with the taps turned off.
In an act of political and economic brinkmanship, the South Sudanese authorities had decided to stop the flow of oil to neighbouring Sudan in order to negotiate a lower royalty rate for the crude flowing through pipelines to Indian Ocean ports. (The country is landlocked.) Considering that more than 95 per cent of the country’s GDP depends on oil, the effects have been catastrophic. We followed the dormant pipeline—a dusty track cutting through the swamp, over a bridge that the Sudanese had failed to properly bomb, toward the oil fields and South Sudan’s viscous heart.
Sitting on our creaking plastic chairs, it occurs to us that this will probably be the only time in our careers we get to see a country taking shape, where the rawness of two opposing positions becomes so clear. There was the South Sudan manifesto, which spoke of a country defined by equality and progress. And there was the extractive fiefdom of Bentiu, where the governor and his court would feed until there was nothing left to eat.
“It’s strange,” Kevin said in the darkness, “but it feels like this place is being pulled apart by something physical. Like a giant mutant slug or something—you can actually feel the evil.”
This is not something you can write in a respectable newspaper, but I know exactly what he means. We are living the brief moment in South Sudan’s history where its circumstances resemble a children’s fable. The forces of good face off against the forces of darkness, and only one comes out a winner. This wasn’t properly true in a political sense, because politics is the art of ameliorating those stark positions. But we have yet to recognize any art in the local politics, and as far as Bentiu is concerned, Kevin’s assessment felt as accurate as any.
That morning, I finished reading the Reasoned Decision. Why pour so much outrage and opprobrium on our sporting heroes, I wonder? Why dog Lance Armstrong into the grave, spending millions of dollars of French and American tax money when so much real, genocidal ignominy goes unpunished? The answer, of course, is that these are our heroes, and their integrity belongs not to them but to us. We will blow any amount of resources in order to ensure that they behave morally, so we can uphold the fiction of our own morality. So now, cyclists sign their bodies away to an Orwellian universe that watches them every minute of the day so the rest of us can go unwatched: the Anti-Doping Administration & Management System, or ADAMS, the program that insists athletes are monitored routinely, wherever in the world they may be, and measured against their bio-passport, the baseline of their physiological components.
The Reasoned Decision is, of course, about more than Armstrong. It details a sophisticated conspiracy that extended over four continents and involved hundreds of people, millions of dollars and crimes far more serious than cheating at sport. There is no doubt in my mind that the UCI knew about the extent of the criminal activity but through silence, inefficiency and greed allowed it to continue, to create its ultimate, logical manifestation: Lance Armstrong Inc. The system needed Armstrong, needed his narrative, to turn the sport into the billion-dollar merchandised carnival it is today. The Reasoned Decision is not only better than Armstrong, it is bigger than him too. It has a force that his constructed story can never have. Even when he won his seventh title, even when climbing the highest alp, he was never this good, never this beautiful. And in reading it, I see a possible future not just for South Sudan, not just for the countries and regions I visit for my work, but for every institutional system that needs fixing. The will to win does not always pervert itself. Sometimes, it inspires men and women to do incredible things.
But the Reasoned Decision document is merely a beginning. So many of my cycling compatriots ask why cycling seems to be the only sport that has come under such scrutiny. They’re looking at it backwards: rather, why has cycling, above all, been given the opportunity to become so clean? Let’s take soccer, which operates under the auspices of the sporting Vatican, the International Federation of Association Football, or FIFA. “I have never seen doping in football,” Spain’s coach Vicente del Bosque has said, “and I don’t think I ever will.” And yet there is airtight evidence connecting Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes—he of the Operación Puerto scandal that brought down tens of cyclists—with both first and second division Spanish clubs. Those clubs feed the national program. “I can’t tell which clubs,” Fuentes has said. “I have received death threats. I was told that, if I told certain things, my family and myself could have serious problems.… There are sports which you cannot go against.”
Arsenal’s manager Arsène Wenger has noted that players coming onto the English Premier League team from the continent boast hematocrit levels that speak of EPO use. An old joke: when Diego Maradona pissed in a cup, there were traces of urine in his drug sample. Gary Neville, the English national team midfielder, wrote of his teammates lining up for mystery injections before the 1988 World Cup fixture against Argentina. In 1977, Franz Beckenbauer told the German publication Stern, “I have a special method to remain at top level: the injection of my own blood. Several times a month, my friend Manfred Köhnlechner draws blood from my arm, and re-injects it in my butt. This causes an artificial inflammation. As a result, the amount of red and white blood cells goes up.”
Most appalling, but by no means exceptional, is the case of Les Fennecs, the Algerian national football squad that had a run of marginal glory in the 1980s. Their star forward Djamel Menad revealed that he and five former teammates have fathered children with disabilities, which they attribute to the mystery drug cocktails they were handed by team doctors. Menad told Goal.com in 2011 that his then 18-year-old daughter was “physically and mentally disabled. She doesn’t speak, she’s not autonomous, she’s not clean. At her age, she doesn’t know how to do her business alone, to clean herself, or even to eat. Plus she doesn’t walk freely. If you make her stand up, she doesn’t know how to orient herself and walk straight because she doesn’t have balance. In her brain, she’s missing something called the corpus callosum. For others, it’s the same or worse.”
I could do this all day. And while it’s tempting to brush it all off as the effluent of a sick society, at the core of it we find traces of every society—the need to generate and venerate heroes, which in turn reinforces the value of the society, no matter the cost. The widespread institutional corruption in local and international football, which runs from match fixing to rampant performance-drug use, is just another example of the species of rot that has forever infected cycling. With football, vigilance has lapsed to a pathetic degree, and FIFA’s fictions are swallowed by a credulous international press and unquestioning fans that number in the billions. It has to change. Hopefully cycling functions as the canary down the mine, as the first mover.
I’ve said that I’ve never thought much of the “cancer as corruption” metaphor. For me, the legions of disabled and disfigured children born of doped-up athletes is a far more poignant metaphor for a broken system. South Sudan’s roving youth, almost all of whom have seen and been scarred by violence, represent another of the country’s vast challenges. For decades, for centuries, war has been the only recourse in this place. And yet, we have met many young men and women who don’t see South Sudan’s future through a rifle scope. They want, as the “Manifesto for South Sudanese Development” promises, to build a nation and society that is inspired by peace, freedom, justice, unity, prosperity and progress.
“Jesus, I hope they can get it together here,” says Kevin. He knows what I know: the South Sudanese must build from scratch a nation in which the governor of Unity State cannot siphon all the oil into his blinged-up Maybach, where corruption is chased down and prosecuted with the same vigour, with the same rapacity, displayed by those hell-bent on eating the country into oblivion.
“Bedtime,” says Kevin, his voice raw with dust and exhaustion. We navigate back to the room by the light of the stars and the glow from my cell phone, trying to avoid the frogs.