These photographs will not be featured on television. They will not be posted millions of times all over the internet. They will not be the subject of breathless newspaper opinion pieces about how the sport of cross-country skiing has been ‘tarnished’, written by journalists who have never skied.

I know too well how it is to be involved in a sport that has been tarnished that way. To this day, when I tell strangers that I was a bike racer, they ask me about doping, certain that I will be able to provide them with stories that will sate their appetite for scandal.

I don’t know what is worse: their certainty or my uncertainty about sport and my own time as a racer.

Of the people I raced with and against, I don’t know who was honest and who cheated.

I do know that on on his day an exceptional athlete can beat anyone who is on drugs. That only adds to the uncertainty.

What happens happens behind closed doors, till it doesn’t.

Still, every one has to lay in bed and face his conscience.

And yet, people’s perceptions of these sports are distorted. Doubt does not make for easy copy. Nor does nuance. Neither is very likely to make an article go viral.

In all of my time on cycling teams, I never saw a needle.

I was in Seefeld, Austria on Sunday the second of March, 2019.

I saw this.

Shot on Kodak Portra 160 with a Nikkormat FT2.

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