By Alan Fischer
TNAZ Senior Writer

An Arizona-based effort to promote clean sport has grown from distributing message T-shirts out of a car to running one of the nation's top amateur bicycle racing teams.

Illegal performance-enhancing drugs have been a blight on sport, and nowhere more noticeably than cycling, where rider after rider – including some of the pro peloton's (main body of riders in a race) top winners – get popped for doping infractions during in-competition and out-of-competition urine and blood testing.

"We wanted to do something that put the word out there that would be the opposite of that," said Doug Loveday, long-time racing cyclist and exercise physiologist by profession. "We wanted to do something more with a purpose."

RideClean, launched in Flagstaff in August 2006, offers riders support to avoid the temptation of using illegal means to succeed, said co-founder Loveday, winner of El Tour de Tucson in 1991 and multiple 2009 Arizona state cycling championship titles.

The effort is not strictly focused on an anti-doping message, but instead tries to get athletes to take an ethical, clean path to sporting success, said Loveday, who now lives in Tucson.

Loveday likened the RideClean philosophy to skiing or riding a mountain bike down a hill. If you focus on a tree or rock in your path, you are likely to steer into it, he said. If you focus your thoughts on a clear path you are less likely to crash into an obstacle.

"There are plenty of anti-doping efforts that look at what we don't want to happen," Loveday said. "We wanted to come up with something focusing on what we want to do, with a positive perspective."

The effort's slogans include "RideClean and the rest will follow" and "How you get there is more important than when you get there."

The effort started small in Flagstaff, and now has followers around the world. "Nothing was intended to be grandiose or big. We printed up a couple of dozen (RideClean) T-shirts," he said. "And as this thing grows and gets a life of its own, we keep going back to the mission of making sure what we are doing.

"In Europe, cyclists are looked at as rock stars, and people take risks for the rewards of being a rock star. We want to make it where riding clean is being the rock star of the sport, and would be attractive to all the people who are getting into it. The highly talented 20 year old getting into the sport is going to have to face these questions."

Smart, hard training, including the use of technology, can replace the perceived shortcut to success that doping may appear to some to offer, Loveday said.

High-tech training devices, like heart rate monitors and power meters that make training more efficient and effective allow athletes to reach their potential with solid work, but no doping, he said.

"Power meters are a great tool especially for anyone new to the sport. It is a quantitative assessment of the work you are doing. It's a very objective tool for determining where you are and where you need to go to perform at the level you want to," he said. "The techies want this, there is a lot of appeal. If you are an engineer you probably have archived 10 years of (power meter workout) files."

"For anyone with specific goals who wants to improve, they are going to get there a lot faster with some structure and a wealth of knowledge," he said.

The RideClean effort, launched in August 2006, soon garnered the support of Steve Lisa, an attorney whose patent procurement, licensing and enforcement law firm's PatentIt.com business brand is the title sponsor of the RideClean cycling team.

Lisa, who divides his time between Paradise Valley, Flagstaff and Chicago, began racing bikes and was appalled to see the sport hit by rampant drug cheating seen in major cycling events including the Tour de France.

"The sport got ripped apart by doping scandals," Lisa said. "It was just awful to see how cheating and doping could rip the hart out of a sport. It gave everyone who rode a bike a bad name. The public viewed cyclists as cheaters," he said.

He threw his personal and financial support at the RideClean effort, and the funding helped the team attend some of the nation's top, and toughest races and step up to the top rung of U.S. amateur racing.

With some domestic teams boasting budgets of millions of dollars, RideClean has succeeded on about $100,000 per year. "We get amazing results on a small budget," Lisa said. "We've shown the (RideClean) message is good and performed at a very high level on a low budget."

The RideClean effort, the brainchild of Loveday and his wife Tanja and supported by Lisa and Marty Ryerson, who handles the day-to-day operations of the team, has made huge progress.

"We've gone from giving away T-shirts out of the Lovedays' truck to having one of the top amateur cycling teams in the nation," Lisa said. "These guys are not on the team just to race, but to spread the message."